Novel carbonate production process designed in the light of a life cycle assessment

Authors
Sparenberg, Marie-Charlotte; Sangsefidi, Vida; Desclée de Maredsous, Béatrice; Luis, Patricia

Abstract
Global warming has been recognized as one of the foremost concerns of our time. In order to face this serious situation, industrial and academic players intensified the research to limit the anthropogenic emissions and their potential consequences. More specifically, this led to the development of several processes dedicated to the capture of CO2 and its reutilization. Carbon conversion via mineralization enables the production of marketable products such as carbonates, which are widely used in various industries. In this work, a novel CO2 capture and revalorization process is studied, taking advantage of novel membrane technologies and their inherent properties to produce sodium bicarbonate out of the captured CO2. The process is divided in two steps: first, an absorption step wherein the CO2 is captured using a membrane contactor. Then, a crystallization step resulting in the recovery of bicarbonate salts using membrane distillation-crystallization. As different routes are considered for this crystallization step, a life-cycle assessment is performed in order to choose the best configuration in terms of environmental burden. Three configurations are compared: osmotic, direct contact and vacuum membrane distillation-crystallization. Some preliminary results will be discussed.