Texas Carbon Management Program
The Texas Carbon Management Program group focuses on carbon capture from coal and natural gas power plant flue gas to help mitigate anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. We investigate post-combustion amine scrubbing, which is a flexible, tail-end technology that can be retrofitted onto existing power plants or be included as part of a greenfield installation. In the amine scrubbing process, CO2 is absorbed into an aqueous amine solvent at low temperature in an absorber, and then the dissolved CO2 and amine solution is sent to a stripper where it is heated to high temperatures causing the CO2 to desorb cleanly. This CO2 is then compressed for geological sequestration or used for enhanced oil recovery.
Our goal is to understand and improve all aspects of amine scrubbing. There are currently seven graduate students working on collecting thermodynamic and rate measurements, testing amine degradation, mitigating nitrosamines, quantifying aerosol formation, creating process models, improving process design and efficiency, and understanding pilot plant results. These efforts have established the use of concentrated, aqueous piperazine (PZ) with an advanced flash stripper as the most efficient, open-literature amine scrubbing system.
If you are interested in participating in the program, further details can be found here.