Session 24. Oral Presentation for: Novel adsorbent for CO2 separation from methane

Presented on 29 May 2025: Session 24 CO2 is generally treated and removed as an impurity in methane production, which can be commonly seen in the traditional natural gas industry as well as the emerging biomethane industry. Conventionally, CO2 is removed using solvent technology, but this process is energy intensive. Second-generation technology such as pressure swing adsorption (PSA) provides the benefits of compactness and low energy requirement, potentially reducing the footprint and operating cost of the CO2 separation process. In the PSA process, adsorbent is an important element to determine PSA performance including energy consumption, separation recovery and purity. Therefore, a good adsorbent is of paramount important and should have properties such as high CO2 working capacity and selectivity, crush strength (for high pressure operation), stability and low cost. CO2CRC, in collaboration with University of Melbourne, developed and tested novel adsorbents suitable for CO2 separation from methane. The adsorbent tested at CO2CRC’s Otway International Test Centre has shown encouraging results for CH4–CO2 separation. This paper presents the latest adsorbent development research, which confirms the improved adsorbent (CO2sorb), has high working capacity and selectivity; suitable for the CO2 separation from high pressure natural gas, especially in high CO2 content (20–40%), high pressure (30–50 bar) natural gas, including potentially separating CO2 from syngas in steam methane reforming process. The research also discovered another improved adsorbent with good CO2 selectivity over methane at low pressure (<2 bar) gas separation, which enable the adsorbent to be used for the CO2 separation from biogas or landfill. To access the Oral Presentation click the link below. To read the full paper click here