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Studying the potential of CCU mineralization techniques for CO2 reduction in Europe

par De Wasseige, John
Président du jury Huart, Michel
Promoteur Achten, Wouter
Co-Promoteur Zeller, Vanessa
Publication Non publié, 2020-06-12

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Résumé :

As the quantity of greenhouse gases emissions, mainly carbon dioxide, produced by the population is increasing, drastic changes need to be implemented in order to achieve the European goals for climate change mitigation. Carbon capture and utilization (CCU) - which consists in actively using the carbon dioxide to store or transform it into a stable form - has recently been increasingly popular. A form of CCU consists in mineralizing CO2 directly into carbonates, which can then replace other materials having some economic value. However, this technique is still not widely deployed and its potential for large scale application needs to be critically assessed.The goal of this thesis is to evaluate the extent to which mineralization can mitigate climate change at the European level. The contribution of this thesis is twofold. First, we evaluate the potential of mineral carbonation at the European level. For this we obtain a lower and upper bound on the amount of CO2 that could be mineralized into wastes in one year if CCU was deployed at a large scale in Europe. We therefore compare different types of wastes and compute for each of them a quantity and a sequestration capacity interval. Our results indicates a potential yearly decrease of 0.34% and 0.68% of carbon dioxide emissions in Europe. Second, we study the relationship between the CO2 uptake and the CO2 emissions over the life cycle of two processes, one that uses waste material as input and another that uses minerals. We therefore conduct a detailed evaluation of the environmental performance of an industrial process of waste mineralization, given confidential data from Carbon8Systems - a UK based company developing technology for waste minerals carbonation. Our results show that the life cycle emissions reduction achievable with their technology allows to sequester more carbon dioxide than a similar process using extracted minerals.