CO2Tech, the commercial arm of leading Australian decarbonisation research organisation CO2CRC, has advanced to the Proof-of-Concept Phase to provide services to Singapore’s National Water Agency (PUB) to reduce its carbon footprint and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

To reach this stage, CO2Tech outperformed close to 70 international submissions to PUB’s Carbon Zero Grand Challenge, making it through to Proof of Concept due to its competitive technological advantages.

CO2Tech’s proposed solution combines its energy efficient, competitively lower cost, modular, scalable and compact hybrid technology HyCaps with fast catalytic carbon mineralisation and provides permanent storage of CO2.

CO2CRC CEO, Dr Matthias Raab, said “Carbon Capture and Utilisation has a vital role to play in achieving global net zero goals by 2050. CCU is a very significant option for certain industries to drive down their emissions permanently and immediately at a competitive cost.”

“HyCaps is an excellent example of an emissions reduction technology that has been developed, trialled and demonstrated in Australia and is now achieving results on the international stage” he said.

CO2CRC is Australia’s leading carbon capture, utilisation and storage research organisation with over 19 years of experience safely capturing, storing and monitoring CO2.

HyCaps is very compact which makes it ideal for locations like Singapore where there are limits to the amount of available land. HyCaps can be deployed on a smaller footprint and can be orientated in any direction, which makes it very applicable for retrofitting. It can also be scaled up to meet required emissions targets and is able to capture CO2 from a stream with 5 to 50% CO2 content.

HyCaps takes advantage of the highly selective nature of solvent absorption technology and controlled flow regimes of membrane technology. The membrane acts to physically separate the solvent and gas flows. This enables much higher CO2 mass transfer into the solvent phase to be achieved than through traditional solvent absorption.

CO2Tech has partnered with CAPTICO2 of Norway as the mineralisation technology provider. The captured CO2 from HyCaps is the feedstock for the mineralisation process alongside brine waste stream from PUB’s desalination plants. The catalytic mineralisation increases the conversion speed from the conventional mineralisation process from 20-60 minutes to approximately 100 seconds and a conversion efficiency (% of CO2 converted) of greater than 80%.

The products of mineralisation process can be used in various applications such as building and construction materials and for land reclamation, thus taking CO2 emissions out of the atmosphere, permanently storing them, and reducing the need for further carbon intensive processes.

Over the next nine months, CO2Tech will develop a desktop simulation based on PUB’s conditions and a detailed design for a demo scale pilot project to proof the concept of their solution. If successful, this will be piloted in a full-scale system for the water agency.