Case Study for the Application of CCUS to a Waste‐to‐Energy Italian Plant

Decarbonization technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) and carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) have recently been considered for application to waste-to-energy (WtE) plants. This type of plants burns waste that could not be prevented or recycled and recovers energy from this incineration process, thus helping to reach the targets set in the European Union Landfill Directive that aims to reduce the amount of waste being landfilled. However, currently, only few WtE plants, mainly located in Northern Europe and in Japan, are coupled to a CCUS system. The aim of this work is to study the application of carbon capture and utilization (CCU) to a WtE plant located in Northern Italy, which would be the first one of this type in this European country. In particular, the focus is on the design of the pilot plant for CO2 capture by means of an aqueous solution of monoethanolamine (MEA, 30 wt.%) on the configuration of the pilot plant for utilization of the captured CO2 for producing baking soda and on a preliminary evaluation of the energy consumptions and costs of the CCU section.