CO2 capture from off-shore gas turbines using supersonic gas separation

Morten Hammer1 Rahul Anantharaman1 Karl Yngve Lervg1

1
SINTEF Energy Research, Trondheim, Norway

Corresponding author: rahul.anantharaman@sintef.no

Abstract

CO2 capture from gas turbine based off-shore application face challenges such as size (foot-print),
weight and stability (wave motion) in addition to the challenges faced by on-shore industry.
Typically, space- and weight challenges are given priority and the size of the capture installations
will be of importance when selecting capture technology rather than process efficiency alone. In the
BIGCCS Centre, various alternatives are being evaluated based on these principles for off-shore
CO2 capture applications. The focus is on identifying processes that do not require large quantities
of steam and those without a gas-liquid interface. One of the options considered for capture is the
use of supersonic nozzles for CO2 capture.

Supersonic gas separation has been studied extensively for compact water removal systems from
raw natural gas streams at high pressure [1,2]. This method has been proposed and being
investigated for CO2 capture from the exhaust of a coal fired power plant as part of the United
States Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy (ARPA-E) [3]. In this work, the applicability
of the supersonic gas separation process for CO2 capture from off-shore gas turbines is studied.

Cooled gas turbine exhaust gas is compressed to a pressure of around 2-3 bar and sent to a Laval
(convergent-divergent) nozzle. The exhaust gas is cooled due to the supersonic expansion, thereby
condensing the CO2 in the exhaust gas as solid particles. These solid particles are recovered by
intruding a swirl in the nozzle and collected in cyclones as shown in Figure 1. As the separation
occurs at supersonic velocities, there is expected to be no deposition of solid CO2 particles in the
nozzle.

Figure 1. Principle of the Laval nozzle for supersonic gas separation.

1
Figure 2. The expansion trajectory for an FPSO gas turbine exhaust gas is shown. The inlet
pressure is set to 3.0 bar, and the inlet temperature is set to 15C. The solid appearance line and
lines where 60, 80 and 90% of the CO2 is sublimated are included.

CO2 capture from the exhaust gas using supersonic gas separation is studied using a steady state
homogeneous equilibrium model (HEM). The flow in the nozzle is assumed to be adiabatic and
ideal, with no friction or gravity effects. The thermodynamic gas properties are calculated using the
Peng-Robinson [4] equation of state. To describe the dry ice, the Gibbs free energy function of
Jger and Span [5] is used, and by coupling the models, gas-solid equilibrium is described. A
typical expansion trajectory for nozzle flow is shown in Figure 2. Specifying the mass flow of
exhaust gas and boundary conditions (pressure, temperature and composition) the required nozzle
flow areas can be calculated.

To determine under which conditions this process is thermodynamically and fluid dynamically
feasible, different boundary conditions are investigated. Assuming capture at 0.1 bar in the
divergent section of the nozzle, the theoretical capture limit from the off-shore gas turbine exhaust
gas with 3.2 mol% CO2 is plotted as a function of inlet temperature for 4 different pressures in
Figure 3. It is seen that elevating the inlet pressure and lowering the inlet temperature will give a
higher conversion of gaseous CO2 to dry ice. Lowering the pressure of capture will increase the
freeze-out percentage of CO2 but the trade-off will be an increased flow area.

2
Figure 3. Theoretical capture limit for supersonic expansion of FPSO gas turbine exhaust gas.

The results indicate that supersonic expansion is a viable strategy for capturing CO2. To assess the
operational performance of the capture process, the Laval nozzle model is integrated in a steady
state process simulation ASPEN HYSYS. As can be seen from Figure 3, there is a trade-off
between compression work and cooling requirement at the inlet of the nozzle. Energy integration of
the process is performed to account for the trade-off and minimize the energy penalty of the
process.

Acknowledgement

This publication has been produced with support from the BIGCCS Centre, performed under the
Norwegian research program Centres for Environment-friendly Energy Research (FME). The
authors acknowledge the following partners for their contributions: Aker Solutions, ConocoPhillips,
Det Norske Veritas, Gassco, Hydro, Shell, Statoil, TOTAL, GDF SUEZ and the Research Council
of Norway (193816/S60).

References

1. Betting, M. and Epsom, H. High velocities make a unique separator and dew-pointer. World
Oil, 197-200, 2007.
2. Alferov, V., Baguirov, L., Dmitriev, L., Feygin, V., Imayev, S. and Lacey, J. Supersonic
nozzle efficiently separates natural gas components. Oil Gas J. 5:53-58, 2005.
3. Anthony C. and Vladimir B. A high efficiency internal CO2 extraction system ICES.
ARPA-E IMPACCT Program Presented at 2010 NETL CO2 Capture Technology Meeting
Sept 13-17, Pittsburgh, PA, 2010.
4. Peng, D. Y. and Robinson, D. B. A new two-constant equation of state. Ind. Eng. Chem.
Fund. 15(1):59-64, 1976.
5. Jger, A. and Span, R. Equation of State for Solid Carbon Dioxide Based on the Gibbs Free
Energy. J. Chem. Eng. Data. 57:590-597, 2012.