Publications

In Indonesia, fly ash is mainly produced from a coal-fired power plant. A 500 MW power plant can produce 500 metric tons of fly ash. Fly ash can be treated to be a cutting-edge technology for reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) and hydrogen sulphide. This paper describes the literature study on optimizing fly ash to capture CO2 in natural gas treatment. Fly ash is a fine powder collected in coal-fired power plant from the combustion gases with an Electrostatic Precipitator and/or bag houses. Under a microscope it looks like tiny solidified bubbles of various sizes around 10µm but can vary from <1µm to over 150µm. The surface area and pore volume of fly ash could be increased by immersing them in an amine solution of the desired amine compound to introduce chemical adsorption sites towards CO2 capture The mixed amine-fly ash composite shows advantages, such as thermal stability, lower cost of based material, less or no corrosion, high sensitivity with CO2, and high surface area. Fly ash derived sorbents represent a potential alternative for natural gas treatments. The existing methods using specialized activated carbon and molecular sieves are likely very expensive and prevent the capability of the CO2 sorption process due to economic constraints. Among the emerging gas treating technologies, the Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) process has drawn market attention because of the intrinsic eco compatibility and flexibility. Combining PSA technology and amine-impregnated fly ash derived sorbents, the advanced natural gas treating system with low capital cost and higher CO2 adsorption efficiency can meet industrial needs. With this implementation, it can increase work productivity within the workforce in the industry by updating the current technology.