Design and performance evaluation of a novel system integrating Water-based carbon capture with adiabatic compressed air energy storage

Carbon capture, utilization, and storage have the potential to reduce human-made carbon dioxide emissions significantly. The energy consumption of water-based carbon capture technology has a significantly negative relationship with the partial pressure of carbon dioxide in the gas, which can be improved by increasing the carbon dioxide concentration or the total pressure of the gas. This work proposes a novel system integrating water-based carbon capture with adiabatic compressed air energy storage system to address these problems. The flue gas with a higher carbon dioxide concentration is employed as the working fluid of the adiabatic compressed air energy storage, and the flue gas's total pressure is raised by the compression train. Thermodynamic analysis was evaluated using steady-state mathematical models and thermodynamic laws. The calculated results show that the energy consumption of carbon capture is 354.23 kWh/t, which is significantly lower than amine-based capture technology (about 1000 kWh/t). The carbon dioxide in the flue is removed in the charging process resulting in the total mass of compressed gas being higher than the expanding one. Hence, additional compression heat can be utilized for heat supply in discharging process, causing the total exergy efficiency of the proposed system is 69.57 % which improves by more than 5 % compared with conventional adiabatic compressed air energy storage system. Meanwhile, the parameter analysis is also carried out to evaluate the influence of several key parameters on the performance of the proposed system. Furthermore, the payback period of around 5.10 years indicates that the proposed system is economically feasible.