Towards Full-Scale Carbon Capture – Results From the Mobile Test Unit in Various Industry Sectors

The Aker Carbon Capture’s Mobile Test Unit (MTU) has been applied at various industrial sites with the purpose of testing different flue gases for carbon capture. The MTU has proven to be a valuable asset for competence development, process modifications and optimization, as well as risk mitigation. The MTU is a custom-built, mobile CO2 capture facility with a capacity of up to 200 kg CO2/h. Since 2008, it has been continuously modified and developed to demonstrate Aker Carbon Capture’s amine-based Advanced Carbon Capture™ (ACC™) process. Several novel features are installed, such as Aker Carbon Capture’s ACC™ Energy Saver, Anti-Mist Design and Emission Control technologies. The MTU offers a unique opportunity to test the capture process in a variety of industrial environments, and to verify new design features and solvents during long-term, onsite testing. This has proven to be an important step on the way to successfully design full-scale carbon capture plants and to qualify the capture process. The MTU has tested eight different flue gases from different industry sectors around the world with the aim of determining key design and performance parameters. Flue gas types tested include gas-based flue gas (Risavika, Norway), coal-fired power plant (Longannet, Scotland and Alabama, USA), gas-fired combined heat and power plant (Mongstad, Norway), Residual Fluid Catalytic Cracker (Mongstad, Norway), cement production (Brevik, Norway), waste-to-energy including Bio-CCS (Oslo, Norway) and hydrogen production unit (Lysekil, Sweden). This paper narrates our accumulated experience with the MTU and highlight its qualities and contributions towards Aker Carbon Capture’s plans of research, development and innovation.