Impact

Pilot plant campaigns, challenges and successes

CSIRO Energy has operated a range of pilot plant campaigns in its small in-house pilot (20 kg CO₂ / hour) using synthetic gas mixtures, and in scale demonstration pilot plants located at three different coal fired power stations in Australia’s eastern states. 

Our first long-term trial pilot plant was designed and constructed in 2008 by IHI Corporation (Japan) and operated on a brown coal flue gas slip stream at AGL Energy’s Loy Yang power station, Victoria. This post-combustion capture research project pilot operation (PICA) was performed for the first time in the southern hemisphere.

Left, The PICA (PCC IHI CSIRO AGL) post-combustion carbon capture pilot plant located at the AGL Loy Yang Power Station, Victoria, Australia. Right,  Tarong Pilot plant in Queensland.

Other pilot plant campaigns have been reported in the Carbon Capture Journal reflecting the broad pilot plant design and operating capability developed at CSIRO. These include:

• Campaigns using MEA and concentrated piperazine at the CSIRO designed and built Tarong pilot plant (100 kg CO₂ / hour) located at Stanwell’s black coal, Power station, Queensland. 
• Campaigns using aqueous ammonia and advanced process designs to mitigate ammonia loss and allow co-capture of sulphur dioxide at a CSIRO designed and built pilot plant (300 kg CO₂ / hour) located at Delta Electricity’s black coal Vales Point Power Station, New South Wales.
• Campaigns using an advanced amine-based process configuration (CS-Cap) that allows the separated but integrated capture of SO₂ and CO₂ in a single absorber column at a CSIRO designed and build pilot plant (50 kg CO₂ / hour) located at AGL’s brown coal Loy Yang Power Station, Victoria.

Operations in several pilot plants have proven invaluable to validate the performance of the absorbents under development and highlight their inadequacies. The technical data and findings from our pilot plants operations have been published in the book Absorption-Based Post-Combustion Capture of Carbon Dioxide.

In the news

• CSIRO trial captures power station carbon emissions
• Building a future for carbon capture technology
• Tarong Energy and CSIRO launch carbon capture plant
• Tackling climate change with a Queensland first
• Carbon capture and storage: An essential part of the circular economy (proactiveinvestors.com.au)

The team

The SCT group has been working in pilot trials for more than 16 years, successfully demonstrating the technical feasibility and economic benefits of the designed capture processes and agents. The deployment and operations are typically conducted by our field and process engineers with vast experience from Gas and Oil Industry.

Team members