Syngas Purification

Abstract

The steel making industry is highly energy intensive and a great contributor of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It generated between 7% and 9% of direct emissions from the global use of fossil fuels in 2017 [1]. Gas emissions in an integrated steel mill (ISM) arise mainly from three streams: coke oven gas (COG), blast furnace gas (BFG) and basic oxygen furnace gas (BOFG).

This study focuses on the short term solutions to become a carbon neutral steelmaker where blast furnaces (BF) and basic oxygen furnaces (BOF) are still a fundamental part of the steel making process. The Rectisol® process is used to capture CO2 from the works arising gases (WAGs) of an ISM and to generate syngas which can be used as a chemical building block to produce liquid fuels among others.

The Rectisol® wash is a patented process by Air Liquide and Linde which uses chilled MeOH as a solvent. Both processes were first validated against stream data provided by the patents. PC-SAFT EOS was used to simulate the purification plant because of its strong theoretical foundation and its ability to adapt the parameters to predict component behaviour. Various binary interaction parameters proposed in literature were used to simulate the purification plants. From these simulations, it was found that the standard binary interaction parameters with the adjusted parameter for H2S-CH3OH, as proposed by Sun et al. [2], showed the best results.
The configurations of Air Liquide and Linde were used as base configuration to clean the feed stream. From these simulations, it was observed that in both configurations large portions of CO2 are lost in the stripping process of both configurations. Enhanced CCS configurations were investigated to increase the CO2 recovery of both configurations. The desorption of CO2 was altered by introducing multiple intermediate flashes to increase the desorption of CO2. Without optimisation, the downstream constraint for the CO2-rich stream of 95% CO2 content was almost met in the Linde configuration and requires further upgrading in the Air Liquide configuration. The decision was made to use the Linde enhanced CCS configuration as a base configuration since this would solely require a change in operating conditions to meet the downstream CO2 requirement of 95% content in the CO2-rich stream.

HCN and H2O require a seperate wash to avoid accumulation in the main wash. To treat these components together with H2S and COS, two pre-wash configurations combined with the Linde enhanced CCS configuration were looked into. A pre-wash configuration with a separate absorber column and dividing wall column (DWC) and a pre-wash configuration with a separate absorber column and rectifier with purge were examined. Both configurations meet the downstream requirements for the purified gas stream and CO2-rich stream. The main difference between the two configurations is the difference in thermal utility consumption and make-up MeOH. The decision was made to move forward with the pre-wash integrated configuration comprising of a rectifier and purge since additional make-up MeOH would be more cost-effective. The energy recovery method proposed by Linnhoff [3] was used to identify any potential energy saving of the purification plant. A heat exchanger network was designed which reduced the cooling duty by 57% to 54,9 MWth and the reboiler duty by 50,6% to 26,8 MWth. Finally, an economic evaluation was made of the final energy integrated configuration. Equivalent annual cost and operating expenditures of the purification plant were estimated at €12.32m and €51.13m respectively per year. This gives a cost per ton captured CO2 of €37,87.