MOLECULAR‐LEVEL OVERHAULING GAP‐1/TEG POST‐COMBUSTION CO2 CAPTURE SOLVENTS

: Capturing CO 2  from post-combustion gas streams is an energy-intensive process that is required prior to either converting or sequestering CO 2 . There are a few commercial offerings aqueous amine technologies, however the cost of capturing CO 2 with these technologies remains high. To decrease costs, researchers are designing efficient drop-in replacements using aqueous amine infrastructure. Water-lean solvents are a part of an approach that aims to increase efficiency by reducing the water content in solution. Water-lean solvents such as GE's GAP/TEG are promising technologies, with potential to halve the parasitic load to a coal-fired power plant, only if high solution viscosities and hydrolysis of the siloxane moieties could be mitigated. We present here, an integrated multidisciplinary approach to overhaul the GAP/TEG solvent at the molecular level to mitigate hydrolysis and reduce viscosity. Molecular-level insights into chemical speciation of CO 2 -containing ions, show that co-solvents and diluents have a negligible effect on reducing viscosity and are not needed. This finding allowed for the design of single-component siloxane-free diamines with site-specific chemical moieties for direct placement and orientation of hydrogen bonding to reduce viscosity. Ultimately, we present new single-component diamine formulations less susceptible to hydrolysis that exhibit up to a 98% reduction in viscosity compared to the initial GAP/TEG formulation.