Assessing the CO2 Emissions Reduction from Cement Industry by Carbon Capture Technologies: Conceptual Design, Process Integration and Techno-economic and Environmental Analysis

Reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from heat and power sector as well as from other energy-intensive industrial applications is of paramount importance in the modern society. The cement production industry is one of the largest industrial sources of CO2 (about 5 % of anthropogenic CO2 emissions). Among various carbon capture methods suitable to be implemented into the cement production process, two reactive gas-liquid absorption and gas-solid (calcium looping) options are evaluated in this paper in post combustion CO2 capture configurations. The paper evaluates (using CAPE methods) the techno-economic and environmental performances for cement plants with carbon capture having an output of 1 Mt/y. Mass and energy integration aspects of the carbon capture unit, associated heat and power plant as well as the influence of various CO2 capture options on the overall cement production performances are discussed in details. For comparison reason, a conventional cement plant without carbon capture was also considered as benchmark case to quantify the energy and cost penalties for CO2 capture. The assessments show that the innovative calcium looping system has significant advantages compared not only to benchmark case without capture but also to the gas liquid absorption CO2 capture case such as: the higher energy efficiency, lower energy penalty for CO2 capture, improved mass and energy integration potential and better techno-economic and environmental performances. The presented techno-economic and environmental analysis for cement production process with carbon capture is very promising to significantly reduce the carbon footprint of this important industrial sector.