New materials for the capture of carbon dioxide

01/04/2014

CIDETEC participates in the European project INTERACT that is aimed at developing new materials and processes for carbon dioxidecapture in post-combustion processes. The project aims to combine new materials such as ionic liquid polymeric membranes (PILs) and biological absorbents such as enzymes (carbonic anhydrase) with innovative technologies that allow for a cut back in overheads of existing technologies.

The project is funded under the European Commission’s ENERGY call for with a budget of 4.8 M € and responds to the need to generate a technology base for highly efficient CO₂ capture. It is hoped that this can be applied to both large-scale power plants or heavy industry, as well as in smaller generated fossil fuel emission sources, and hence reduce its environmental impact.

The consortium consists of eleven partners from the industry sector, universities and research centres in ten European countries and one American country. Besides CIDETEC, the following centres take part: the Norwegian SINTEF Technology Centre, the Institute of Chemical Engineering of the Academy of Sciences of Poland (ICEPAS); internationally renowned universities such as the Technical University of Dortmund (TUDO), Denmark (DTU), and Leuven (KU Lueven), the German engineering firm SUPREN and the Spanish firm PRODINTEC, the French SOLVIONIC and the U.S. multinational NOVOZYMES. In addition, INTERACT is working on two Australian twinning projects financed by Anlec R & D (agency under the "Australian Coal Association" and the "Department for Resources, Energy and Tourism") funded.

CIDETEC is the leader of the first work package - WP1- "Synthesis and characterization of PILs." Its technical task is the development of ionic polymeric liquids to be supplied to the consortium partners for evaluation in membrane technologies.