Amine scrubbing for CO2 capture.

Amine scrubbing has been used to separate carbon dioxide (CO2) from natural gas and hydrogen since 1930. It is a robust technology and is ready to be tested and used on a larger scale for CO2 capture from coal-fired power plants. The minimum work requirement to separate CO2 from coal-fired flue gas and compress CO2 to 150 bar is 0.11 megawatt-hours per metric ton of CO2. Process and solvent improvements should reduce the energy consumption to 0.2 megawatt-hour per ton of CO2. Other advanced technologies will not provide energy-efficient or timely solutions to CO2 emission from conventional coal-fired power plants.