A consortium of 11 European stakeholders including ArcelorMittal, Axens, IFP Energies nouvelles (IFPEN) and Total launched a project on Tuesday to demonstrate an innovative process for capturing carbon dioxide from industrial activities, Total announced.
According to the company's statement, the DMX project is part of a more comprehensive study dedicated to the development of the future European Dunkirk North Sea capture and storage cluster.
The '3D' project (for DMX Demonstration in Dunkirk) is part of Horizon 2020, the European Union’s research and innovation program. The project has a €19.3 million budget over 4 years, including €14.8 million in EU subsidies.
The project has three goals one of which is to demonstrate the effectiveness of the DMX process on a pilot industrial scale.
The construction of the pilot, designed by Axens, will start in 2020 at the ArcelorMittal steelworks site in Dunkirk and will be able to capture 0.5 metric tons of carbon dioxide an hour from steelmaking gases by 2021.
The DMX process, a patented process stemming from IFPEN’s Research and to be marketed by Axens, uses a solvent that reduces the energy consumption for capture by nearly 35 percent compared to the reference process, according to the press release.
Additionally, using the heat produced on site will cut capture costs in half, to less than 30 euros per metric ton of carbon dioxide.
The project also aims to prepare the implementation of a first industrial unit at the ArcelorMittal site in Dunkirk, which could be operational starting in 2025.
'It should be able to capture more than 125 metric tons of carbon dioxide an hour, i.e more than one million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year,' the statement said.
The project will also design the future European Dunkirk North Sea cluster, which should be able to capture, pack, transport and store 10 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year and should be operational by 2035, it added.
This cluster will be backed up by the packing and transport infrastructures for storing carbon dioxide in the North Sea developed by other projects such as the Northern Lights project that Total is already involved in.
Coordinated by IFPEN, the '3D' project brings together 10 other partners from research and industry from six European countries: ArcelorMittal, Axens, Total, ACP, Brevik Engineering, CMI, DTU, Gassco, RWTH and Uetikon.
By Hale Turkes
Anadolu Agency
energy@aa.com.tr