Advanced technology development reducing CO2 emissions by Dong Sup Kim, SK energy Institute of Technology, Korea e-mail: [email protected] Abstract Responding to Korean government policies on green growth and global energy/environmental challenges, SK energy, the largest energy company in Korea, has been developing new technologies to reduce CO2 emissions by 1) CO2 capture and utilization (CCU), 2) efficiency improvement, and 3) Li-ion batteries. The paper introduces three advanced technologies developed by SK energy; GreenPolTM Technology, ACOTM Technology, and Li-ion battery. Contributing to company vision, “more energy and less CO2”, the three technologies are characterized as follows. GreenPol utilizes CO2 as a feedstock for making polymer. Advanced Catalytic Olefin (ACO) reduces CO2 emission by 20% and increase olefin production by 17%. Li-ion Batteries for automotive industries improves CO2 emission. Keywords: CO2 Capture and Utilization (CCU), Efficiency Improvement, Li-ion Batteries 1. Introduction Energy & Environmental Challenges The world faces energy and environmental challenges. There are obvious 3 hard truths of which are already known. The first truth is energy demand will continue to increase in the future. This demand will be driven by population growth, rapid economic growth in developing countries, and their living standards. Another truth is, fossil fuel reserves are dwindling, and getting harder to find. And the third, there are other environmental issues not only CO2, but also land, water, etc. 1 To solve the problems resulted from the inconvenient truths international community has started to take actions. As a result of the Copenhagen Climate conference 193 participating countries agreed to reduce green house gas emissions sufficiently to prevent global temperature increases of no more than 2 degrees centigrade by 2020. According to an article from UN, many countries announced their plans to reduce CO2 emissions. SK energy, the largest energy company in Korea, has been developing new technologies reducing CO2 emissions by CO2 capture and utilization (CCU), efficiency improvement and Li-ion batteries. The Korean government is also working on a long-term plan to reduce CO2 emissions by 30% New Opportunities in Green Growth World leading companies in private sector have responded to the government-led initiatives and have been searching for new opportunities in green growth. In 2030, the potential market size in green growth such as biofuel, water, wind, PV, CDM, etc. is estimated at 7 trillion dollars. Huge rewards await the pioneers who succeed in Green Industry. For its part, the Korean government announced a five-year plan for green growth starting last year. It calls for an investment of 85 billion dollars for developing 27 core technologies into new growth engines. These green technologies will cover the following 5 sectors; 1) Clean Energy Sources: Solar cells, Evolutionary water reactor 2) High Efficiency: LED lighting, Batteries 3) Greening Industry·Space: (P)HEV/EV, FCV, Eco-cities 4) Environmental Protection· Resource Circulation: Climate change forecasting, CCS 5) Zero-pollution Economic Activity: Convergence Contents As a leading energy company in Korea, SK energy focused on 3 key areas: 1) expand energy source: new and renewable energy including biofuel and solar etc. 2) increase energy efficiency: invent new catalytic processes etc. 3) mitigate green house gas emission: battery for electric vehicles, converting carbon dioxide into polymers. In this paper, 3 advanced technologies are introduced, GreenPolTM Technology, 2 ACOTM Technology, and Li-ion battery. TM GreenPol utilizes CO2 as a feedstock for making polymer. For this reason, SK energy introduced a new concept CCU stands for carbon capture and utilization. Importantly, the polymers made from CO2 offer several advantages over conventional polymers. Advanced Catalytic Olefin (ACO) reduces CO2 emission by 20% and increase olefin production by 17% (49% vs. 61%). Conventional olefin manufacturing technology is a thermal cracking process which was developed 100 years ago. SK energy has developed is a new process technology that cracks naphtha by means of a fluidized bed catalytic reaction. One of biggest advantage of ACO technology in the aspect of green growth is to increase energy efficiency. ACO technology uses a simple, single reactor as compared to the conventional thermal-cracking process that uses a multi-furnace, and with low-temperature operation to reduce investment and energy consumption. Li-ion Batteries for automotive industries improves CO2 emission. More than half of the world’s oil production is used by the transportation sector and an estimated 21% of greenhouse gases released from the Earth are produced from transportation. SK energy has developed advanced Li-ion Batteries for next-generation vehicles such as HEVs (hybrid electric vehicles), PHEVs (plug-in HEVs), and EVs (electric vehicles). 2. Progress of Technical Development GreenPolTM Technology A popular phrase nowadays is sustainable development. The term refers to development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generating to meet their own needs. In general, a great deal of CO2 is produced which during the plastic production from hydrocarbon. SK energy developed a new catalytic process which utilizes CO2 for making plastics/polymers. CO2 cannot be directly converted to a polymer, but can yield polymer when combined with certain epoxides including ethylene oxide, propylene oxide, and cyclohexeneoxide etc. 3 TM GreenPol technology which is an alternating copolymer of CO2 and epoxide has characteristics of low petroleum dependency (44% CO2), enzyme degradable, clean burning, adherence to cellulose substrates and transparency.1 Figure1. Chemical reaction mechanism of GreenPolTM technology As shown in the figure 1 above, a suitable catalyst must be required in order to combine CO2 and epoxide to produce a polymer. A candidate catalyst was first discovered in 1969 at the Tokyo Institute of Technology,2 and others researchers introduced processes and catalysts to produce CO2 polymers. However, the previous developments have limitations for commercial utilization. SK energy has developed a dual functional catalyst based on Cobalt metal, which can produce the copolymer with much higher efficiency than any other existing catalysts.3 Our dual functional catalyst shows high activity even at low cat./monomer ratio and the polymerization process can be efficiently operate at higher temperatures (60-75 ºC). For the commercialization of polymers, introduction of continuous polymerization process is critical. SK energy’s engineering and processing teams successfully developed a continuous process for the production of CO2 based polymers. The schematic diagram of SK energy’s continuous polymerization process is as shown in below Figure 2 4 Figure 2. Schematic Diagram of SK energy’s Continuous Polymerization Process GreenPol, CO2-epoxide polymer, is attractive and promising in many aspects. GreenPol, SK-CO2-propylene oxide polymer contains 44 percent of CO2 by weight. This is a way to utilize CO2 as a feed for producing polymers. Propylenediol has been approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration as a food additive. GreenPol burns gently in air (as gently as wood or alcohol) without emission of toxic fumes or ash residue, which makes disposal by incineration practical and safe. Furthermore, it has potential as a food packaging material. It shows superior optical properties (transparency), which is enhancing its application in food packaging. This CO2 based polymer shows excellent barrier properties towards O2 and H2O, which is comparable to Nylon and EVOH (ethylene vinyl alcohol). The adhesive property is good, allowing use with other materials. One disadvantage is a weak thermal property and low glass transition temperature. It also starts to decompose at 180 degrees Celsius, which may limit its use. These limitations can be overcome by changing the epoxides and /or introducing terpolymerization process, which will help to control the glass transition temperatures, thermal properties and other polymer properties. 5 ACO Technology The basic materials of the chemical industry such as ethylene and propylene are being produced in the steam cracking process.4 One of the fastest growing petrochemical markets is that for propylene, driven primarily by the high growth rate of polypropylene.5 Therefore, various propylene technologies are investigated such as propane dehydrogenation, metathesis, MTO/MTP, Olefin cracking but steam cracking process has been most widely utilized. However, the steam cracking process has several drawbacks such as the high temperature required for the cracking reaction, the deposition of coke in the tubes, and the relatively low selectivity in ethylene from heavy feeds.6 To solve these drawbacks catalytic cracking method has been studied.4,6,8~13 These studies include utilizing a packed bed. The packed bed reactor suffers from coking. SK energy utilized a circulating fluidized bed and it is a continuous process because of because of regenerating catalyst continuously. This is the ACO (Advanced Catalytic Olefins) process (Figure 3). Figure 3. Typical ACO reactor flow scheme The ACO process produces both polymer grade ethylene and propylene. Much of the process flow scheme is in line with typical olefins plant recovery, however, there are some unique features. For example, the amount of acetylene can