Adsorption - Introduction to Carbon Capture and Sequestration - page 268

carbon capture plant tomorrow . As we have seen in the previous section,
amine processes are lying on the shelves. Processes based on MOFs are
in such an early stage of development that it would be impossible today
to build such a process on the scale of a single power plant. To put it
another way, the synthesis of new MOFs is done on the scale of a micro-
gram per PhD student per day, while amines are already used on a com-
mercial scale. So, if we need to build a carbon capture plant tomorrow,
it will be based on amine absorption. A different question is: will the next
generation of plants that capture carbon use MOFs?
This is a much debated question at carbon capture conferences. The
underlying question is important: given that we have amine technologies
does it make sense to develop another technology? Or, should we invest
all our money in optimizing the current technologies? As you may guess,
our answer is that we should do both. If we look at the costs of R&D,
Development is orders of magnitude more expensive compared to
Research. We need to be very critical in making the decision to develop
a novel technology, but in the research stage one would like to have as
many options as possible. So, yes we need to do research for the sake
of the second or third generation of carbon capture technologies. We
need to fi nd the best liquid absorber, the best solid adsorber, and as we
will discuss in the next section, the best membrane. At the end of the day
it may very well be that only one technology will survive. In this respect,
science is surprisingly similar to real life. Would it not be nice to buy only
winning tickets in the lottery?
After this somewhat lengthy introduction let us ask again: can we
compare amine- and MOF-based technologies? The underlying question
is how to compare a mature technology with an emerging research topic
on an equal footing. Sathre and Masanet [6.39] have taken the fi rst steps
to address this question. The starting point is a prospective life-cycle
modeling of a CCS process. The importance of a complete life-cycle
analysis of the process is that it includes all aspects of the process. For
example, let us suppose that the degradation of material A is 1% per
week and for material B 2% per week. Clearly one would argue the fi rst
is superior, but if a subsequent life-cycle analysis of the synthesis of
these materials shows that it costs more than twice as much energy to
synthesize material A, then material B might still be superior.
The challenge for the MOF system is to make a credible life-cycle
analysis of a process that does not exist, while for the amine process real