Techno-economic assessment of an industrial carbon capture hub sharing a cement rotary kiln as sorbent regenerator

The concept of CCS cluster brings together multiple CO2 industrial emitters using shared capture and/or transportation infrastructure and offers several advantages for network partners compared with point-to-point individual projects. It reduces costs for CCS, and enables CO2 capture from small volume industrial facilities. The proposed concept connects a cluster of industrial sites with significant heat demands with a cement plant through the implementation of a Ca-looping CCS system. This system treats the flue gas from all the industrial emitters in independent boiler/carbonators while uses the kiln furnace as calciner for the cement and the capture plant. The carbonator reactors located in each one of the industry sites are fed by CaO from the cement plant to capture the CO2 content of their own flue gas. After carbonation reaction, the exhaust sorbent is transported back to the cement plant for regeneration in the kiln furnace. The aim of this work is to analyse the techno-economic feasibility of the proposed Ca-looping CCS cluster. The economic assessment, assuming 20 €/ton CaO and carbon market 30 €/ton CO2 points out the feasibility of this kind of centralized carbon capture system to handle the carbon from small emitters. Results show that the operating costs of small companies that use coal or natural gas reduce from 21.3 M€ to 18.8 M€ or from 25.5 to 23.0 M€. For the cement industry this income lessens its operating costs 1.9 M€ lower than a reference situation where CCS is only implemented in cement plant.