Welcome to the Flue-Ture
Project Description Heading link
The build-up of greenhouse gases present in our atmosphere has been a growing concern over the past few decades because it’s damaging the environment and causing a rise in global temperatures. There is no current method to remove this carbon dioxide and other contaminants, so our goal as a society is to limit the future emissions to prevent even more damage. Our project addresses this problem in two ways, by repurposing carbon dioxide that would be emitted, as well as producing a clean diesel fuel that could potentially reduce the SOx and NOx emissions that come from burning standard diesel fuels. Dimethyl Ether (DME) is a common Liquified Petroleum Gas replacement, as well as a clean diesel fuel, as in it releases much less contaminants than standard diesel. Production of DME as only a diesel substitute is currently economically unfeasible due to society’s dependence on fossil fuels as source of power. Instead, the DME production proposed in our project would serve to fill the need for Liquified Petroleum Gas replacement in China, in turn helping to reduce the global dependence on fossil fuels. One of the largest sources of carbon dioxide emissions is in the flue gas released from productions plants. Our project capitalizes upon that fact by capturing the carbon dioxide from a power plant flue gas using a Methyl Diethanolamine (MDEA) solvent. The carbon dioxide is then purified and hydrogenated via a one-step synthesis to form Dimethyl Ether. The plant proposed in this project would serve as a small-scale pilot plant to determine the viability of a future large-scale production as society leans away from the dependence on fossil fuels.