A good recovery

Samsung Engineering is to deploy Mitsubishi Heavy Industries' (MHI) CO₂ recovery technology at the site of a petrochemical company in Vietnam.

The CO₂ recovery facility, which will be built at the Phu My Fertiliser Plant of PetroVietnam Fertilizer and Chemicals Corporation (PVFCCo) near Ho Chi Minh City, is slated to go on-stream in early 2011, and expected to increase urea production at the plant by 60,000 tons per year.

The MHI technology recovers CO₂ from flue gas emitted during the urea fertiliser production process, which uses natural gas as fuel, and provides the captured CO₂ as feedstock for urea synthesis.

The CO₂ contained in the flue gas emitted from the primary reformer during the ammonia production process will be absorbed into MHI's KS-1 proprietary solvent, which MHI jointly developed with Kansai Electric Power Company.

The CO₂ is then synthesised with ammonia for use as feedstock for urea production. The technology can recover approximately 90 per cent of the CO₂ in flue gas.

Outside Japan, MHI delivered its first CO₂ recovery facility to a fertiliser production plant in Malaysia in 1999.

To date, the company has seen the technology used at a total of eight fertiliser production plants around the world, including facilities in India, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Japan.

In addition to urea production, CO₂ recovery technology can be used to produce methanol and dimethyl ether (DME).