Production of power and valuable chemical feed stock with integrated CO2 capture

The project aims to develop technologies for production of electricity and valuable feedstock products (hydrogen, carbon) with integrated CO2 capture. The project focuses on the development of reactor technologies for high efficiency autocatalytic conversion of natural gas to valuable feedstock products. One of the central parts of the technology is the possibility to integrate with Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC), where the excess heat from the SOFC to the reactor allows a total theoretical system efficiency of >90%. State-of-the-art technologies operating within the same domain experience high levels of material wear / degradation and clogging during the deposition phase. The design proposed, build and tested by Prototech uses a different approach to prevent this degradation and/or accumulation of deposited products. Q1 2014 - an early design concept model was manufactured and tested to highlight the technical challenges of the process. The obtained data were used to model a new simplified and improved reactor design by removing, as far as possible, the moving parts, which proved to be difficult to handle. Q1 - Q2, 2014 - was designated and used for establishing the new simplified lab scale reactor design. The design principles employed allow for up-scaling of capacity to larger systems. Q3 - Q4, 2014 - the new simplified design was modelled and built while hardware components were procured and installed. Also, the carbon catalyst material to be tested in the new system was bought and received. Q1 - Q2 2015 - the carbon deposition tests began in the lab. Process parameters such as temperature, flow rates and carbon catalyst were varied, and system response recorded. The dynamics of carbon deposition and hydrogen formation were studied in order to find the optimal process conditions. Initial and deposited carbons were characterised using the infrastructure from University of Bergen. A poster about the reactor design and building process was presented during the CLIMIT summit meeting in Oslo (February 2015). Q3 - Q4 2015 ? Carbon deposition tests were performed on various fillers in the reactor to determine the optimal surface shape and composition. Catalytic properties of even the reactor material itself were highlighted. Carbon deposition tests were combined with gasification of the deposited carbon (reaction of solid carbon with CO2 producing CO gas). Overall, a solid background data was collected on the proposed process and reactor, but a number of issues were identified. Resolving these issues is the subject of the follow-up Climit project.

The project aims to develop technologies for production of electricity and valuable feedstock products with integrated CO2 capture. The project will focus on reactor technologies for high efficiency conversion of natural gas to products and integration wi th solid oxide fuel cells. The proposed innovations will be developed by Prototech AS in cooperation with Department of Physics and Technology, University of Bergen. The results will form the basis for the design of a pilot plant.