Introduction to Carbon Capture - Introduction to Carbon Capture and Sequestration - page 148

(CO 2 , SO x , H 2 S) from natural gas, not for separating CO 2 from fl ue gas.
The good news is that several of these technologies can very easily be
adapted for the purpose of carbon capture [4.3]. From an industry per-
spective, these older methods may actually be more appealing than new
capture technology, because techniques like amine scrubbing are “tried
and true” compared to technologies developed specifi cally for carbon
capture that use completely new ideas and materials. As this fi eld has
become a very active area of research, however, the number of alterna-
tive technologies will likely increase rapidly in the near future.
The fi eld of carbon capture is too large to cover completely in a single
textbook, so rather than spread ourselves thin, we will focus mainly on
the role of novel materials in gas separations. From our perspective, it is
very tempting to make many arguments for why novel materials are the
most important aspect of carbon capture. But the more accurate and
honest reason why we have chosen to focus on novel materials is that
two of our authors' research happens to focus on precisely this topic.
Our decision to leave out many other worthy aspects of carbon capture
is certainly not due to their lack of importance. Rather, it is that we want
to stick to what we know best. Naturally, we leave it to the reader to
conclude whether we succeed in presenting some new and original
views on this topic based on our research.

Section 2
Gas separations

In the previous section, we mentioned several different types of gas
separations that are used in carbon capture technologies. These
included:

• CO 2 from N 2 in fl ue gasses

• O 2 from air (to obtain pure oxygen)

• CO 2 from the mixture of H 2 /CO/CO 2 (the syngas in coal gasifi cation

from which the CO 2 needs to be removed)