Process Ecology Inc.
February 2016
Executive Summary
Process Ecology conducted an extensive literature review on the subject of amine emissions (including amine emissions and amine degradation product emissions). Two major processes which are sources of emissions were the focus of this literature review: the natural gas sweetening process and the CO2 capture process.
For the gas sweetening process, the most common continuous losses of amine are entrainment loss, vapourization loss and degradation loss. The entrainment loss and vapourization loss will end up in the sweet gas stream and they are not released directly to air at the sweetening facility. The amine loss from degradation within the gas sweetening process will mostly end up in solid waste from regenerator, which does not significantly affect air quality.
For the amine-based CO2 capture process, most of the amine losses will be released to air directly, without any control on the contactor overhead. Moreover, a variety of degradation products including nitrosamine (a carcinogen) will be formed in the CO2 capture process and be released to air.
After amines are released to air, they will begin degrading to other chemical compounds. The atmospheric reactions are complex and compounds including nitrosamines can be formed. Process Ecology also conducted an environmental fugacity study through a third party company to investigate the concentration of MEA and other amines which may be released to water and soil using emission data from literature. It was shown that the amine-based CO2 capture process has the potential to put at risk surface drinking water sources in Alberta that may be near CO2 capture facilities.
Human health and environmental impact of amines and amine degradation products were also reviewed in this study.
Although a significant amount of literature is available, there is still a lack of real plant data and real online measurement of amine emissions for sound decisions to be made. With CO2 capture attracting more and more attention in order to reduce GHG emissions from SAGD and other industrial plants, including power plants, it is important to fully understand and control the risk of amine emissions from this process.
The report is organized as follows:
In Section I, the amines and amine degradation products emission sources and emission rates are reviewed. Simulations using HYSYSTM and VMGSimTM are performed to investigate the amine vapourization loss from the contactor. Measurement technologies for amine emissions are also reviewed.
In Section II, the atmospheric reactions of amines and the amine partitioning in the environment are reviewed. Human health and environmental impact of amines and amine degradation products are also reviewed in this section.
In Section III, regulations on amine and amine degradation products are presented.
Section IV gives conclusions and recommendations for future work.
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