Integrated carbonation: a novel concept to develop a CO2 sequestration module for power plants

Mineral carbonation has been proposed as a. promising CO2 sequestration technology, and serpentine minerals have been identified as suitable feedstocks for mineral carbonation. However, current mineral carbonation studies using serpentine minerals require pulverization of the raw minerals, long reaction times and extremely high partial pressures. Consequently, mineral carbonation will only become a viable cost-effective sequestration technology through innovative development of fast reaction routes under milder regimes in a continuous process. The work reported here focuses on surface activation studies of serpentine minerals to accelerate the carbonation reaction efficiency. The work presented has shown that it is possible to increase the surface area of the serpentine minerals to similar to330m(2)/g, compared to only similar to8m(2)/g for the raw serpentine. The SEM studies show that the structure of the activated serpentines has been significantly altered. The TGAs profile for the activated serpentines, particularly the physically activated sample, show significantly smaller weight loss than the parent untreated sample (3wt% vs. 15 wt%).