Innovations in industrial carbon capture

Lhoist’s Jean Marbehant pretty much summed up the bind the cement and lime industries face from the tightening COP21 climate agreement when he said, “We produce CO₂… and our by-product is lime.” He made the comment at a ground breaking event that HeidelbergCement hosted this week for a new carbon capture pilot project at the CBR Lixhe cement plant in Belgium. The project with the Low Emissions Intensity Lime And Cement (LEILAC) Consortium will test Australian company Calix’s direct CO₂ separation process at an operational cement plant for two years at a pilot level scale.

Previously the technology has been used by Calix in the magnesite calcining sector in Australia. Now it will be trialled at 10t/hr of raw material for cement production and 8t/hr of ground limestone in a 60m tall direct separation reactor that is about to be built next to the cement plant’s pre-heater tower. The process has a target to capture up to 95% of process CO₂ emissions. Construction is scheduled to be completed in 2018 and then followed by two years of operation and testing until the end of 2020. At this point the Euro12m funding ends but the next steps, if agreed, would be to test the process at a commercial scale for lime production and a large scale demonstration at a cement plant by 2025. Full scale commercial application at a cement plant would then happen by 2030.

The Innovation in Industrial Carbon Capture Conference was built around the various carbon capture initiatives that HeidelbergCement is involved with. The other big pilot is the oxyfuel project it is running with LafargeHolcim and the European Cement Research Academy (ECRA). As ECRA’s Volker Hoenig explained, this project is now set to move to the pilot scale at two cement plants in 2020 at a cost of Euro90m. The plants, in Italy and Austria, have been chosen so that the testing can start at a ‘simple’ plant and then move to a more complicated one. The former site, Colleferro, has a spare unused kiln that doesn’t use alternative fuels, making the testing less complicated. The latter, Retznei, does co-process alternative fuels and it also has a kiln bypass system. It’s also worth noting that Calix’s direct separation process is intended to be compatible with an oxyfuel kiln. Other technologies were also previewed at the conference such as the Cleanker calcium looping project, the CO2MIN mineral carbonation project, the Carbon8 process to make aggregates from flue gas and HeidelbergCement’s experiences with growing microalgae.

The event to mark the start of the pilot was an optimistic one but the cement and lime producers like Jean Marbehant have no illusions about the cliff face-steep challenge that meeting the CO₂ emissions reduction targets the Paris agreement potentially demands. One slide Marbehant discussed in his presentation placed the CO₂ marginal abatement cost for carbon capture at Euro90/t. However, since the European Union (EU) Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) currently places the cost of CO₂ at Euro9/t the real question about the future of carbon capture is about who is going to pay the bill. Albert Scheuer, a board member of HeidelbergCement, made it clear how his company thinks the cost should be divided when he said that its end product was concrete and he explained just how much cement and concrete everyone uses in their lifespan. He may not have said that we all need to pay but he certainly made it feel that way. The future of carbon capture it seems may be a bit like a group of friends awkwardly deciding how to split the bill after a meal.

One speaker at the LEILAC event used the phrase ‘no silver bullet’ to describe how industrial CO₂ emissions could be cut and how Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) might be used. Perhaps more tellingly though has been the emergence of a new acronym that seems to be doing the rounds at the European Parliament, of ‘Carbon Capture and Something.’ That ‘something’ here is of critical importance as it can either put up or decrease the price that CCS will add to cement production. So, whilst moving to Carbon Capture and Something might suggest that legislators are starting to get realistic about what carbon capture might actually be able to do, it might also indicate a naïve lack of understanding of how hard cutting CO₂ emissions is from essential industries that produce CO₂ from their core process.

The challenge for cement producers in this kind of environment is deciding how far they should go towards exploring CO₂ reduction strategies whilst governments are not being precise about how they intend to meet their targets. Going first might bring an innovator advantages if the legislation toughens up, but the early cost is high. HeidelbergCement and others are definitely doing ‘something’ but commercial applications are at least a decade away at current funding levels. And that timescale doesn’t include rolling out the new technologies across the entire industry. Despite this it was reassuring to hear the director of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Climate Action say that his outfit didn’t want to reduce cement production, only CO₂ emissions. This was ‘something’ cement producers want to hear.