Description
To achieve national and international climate policy targets, CO₂ emissions must be significantly reduced across all industrial sectors. In many areas, this goal can be achieved by substituting fossil energy carriers. However, there are sectors such as cement production or waste incineration in which CO₂ emissions are mainly process-related and therefore cannot be completely avoided.
The production of cement causes approximately 600 kg of CO₂ emissions per ton of product, of which about 400 kg result from process-related emissions due to calcination. In Germany, the cement industry accounts for around 2% of national CO₂ emissions, while its global share is approximately 8%.
A key approach to decarbonizing these industrial sectors is the capture of CO₂ followed by its subsequent storage and utilization. This utilization pathway is known as Carbon Capture and Utilization (CCU) and describes the use of captured CO₂ as a feedstock, for example in the production of chemicals or in the food industry. For CO₂ capture, both absorptive and adsorptive processes are considered, with the choice depending on technical, economic, and site-specific boundary conditions.
Within the DECIDE project (Developing Efficient Cement Industry Decarbonisation), both adsorptive and absorptive CO₂ capture technologies are being further developed in collaboration with the project partners Linde Engineering and OTH Regensburg. The Institute of Plant and Process Engineering focuses on absorptive processes and develops steady-state and dynamic simulations of gas scrubbing plants. In cooperation with the project partner Linde, the developed models are validated using measurements from a real plant at a cement production site. For this purpose, the plant from the CAP2U project located in Lengfurt is available. In addition to the main process, a further focus is placed on trace components and their mass balancing. Based on simulations, parameter studies are subsequently conducted to develop optimized operating strategies.
