ION Engineering

Jun 8, 2017

Thursday June 8, 2017 0 comments Tags: Boulder , ION Engineering , Erik Mueleman , Buz Brown , Advanced Liquid Absorbent System BOULDER -- ION Engineering , a leading carbon capture technology company based in Boulder, today announced it has successfully completed a six-month demonstration of its carbon capture system at the CO2 Technology Center Mongstad (TCM) in Norway. During the TCM campaign, ION said it conducted more than 150 individual experiments, testing its system on residue fluid catalytic cracker (RFCC) gas from Statoil's refinery, which closely resembles the CO2 concentration of the flue gas produced in coal-fired power plants. It also tested on flue gas from TCM's combined heat and power (CHP) plant, which is fueled by natural gas. To date, ION is the only U.S. company to have successfully tested its capture technology on RFCC gas at TCM. ION said its proprietary Advanced Liquid Absorbent System (ALAS) is comprised of a liquid absorbent, process technology, and the company's newest analytical technology -- a Multicomponent Liquid Analyzer (MLA) capable of near-real-time compositional analysis of the liquid absorbent. ION said its ALAS campaign successfully captured more than 90% of the CO2 during steady-state testing from both the refinery and natural gas-fired flue gases with CO2 product purity of greater than 99%. ION said ALAS consistently exceeded expectations from its predictive modeling. On the CHP flue gas, the ALAS required significantly less energy when compared with the industry-standard 30% MEA solvent previously tested at TCM with minimal solvent loss and emissions. ION said it also conducted the first successful field tests of two of its MLA devices and validated their performance when compared to traditional wet laboratory analyses. By the end of the campaign, ION said it captured more than 14,000 tons of CO2, the equivalent of removing nearly 3,000 vehicles from the road. ION said its successful technology demonstration puts the company in a leading position for broad scale deployment of carbon capture technologies on a global basis. "The TCM campaign has proven that ION's Advanced Liquid Absorption System is capable of successfully capturing over 90% of CO2 from refinery flue gas and natural gas, with low emissions and energy requirements," said Dr. Erik Meuleman, ION’s CTO. "Our technical team installed, tested and verified the operation of our breakthrough MLAs. The analyzers are a total game changer, providing near real-time composition analysis of the liquid absorbent, which streamlines the operation of the entire plant and reduces operating costs." ION said the International Energy Agency (IEA) has conclusively determined there are no other practical alternatives to the use of carbon capture technology to achieve deep decarbonization and the requisite CO2 reductions under the international Paris Agreement. "TCM has proven to be an excellent facility operated by very experienced engineers, providing an endless pool of invaluable data,” said Dr. Buz Brown, ION’s CEO. “The collaboration was simply fantastic. We now feel extremely comfortable designing and building commercial CO2 capture plants utilizing our Advanced Liquid Absorption System." Funding for ION's multi-phase project -- more than $25 million -- was provided by the Department of Energy's NETL, with significant in-kind contributions from TCM. The first phase of the project was conducted at the National Carbon Capture Center in Wilsonville, Ala., where ION successfully demonstrated its capture system on coal-fired flue gas.