ION was founded in 2008 in Boulder, Colorado and is a leader in carbon dioxide capture technologies and provider of decarbonized, blue energy for the electric power industry. The company has been awarded over $85 million in competitive, peer-reviewed U.S. Department of Energy awards to advance its technology and done over 14,000 hours of successful performance testing at facilities that include the National Carbon Capture Center in Alabama and Technology Centre Mongstad in Norway, the world’s largest and most advanced carbon capture test facility. ION’s proprietary carbon capture technology demonstrates transformational performance and is more effective and cost efficient than current commercial solutions to capture CO2 emissions from post-combustion utility and industrial point sources. Most significantly, ION’s technology can capture between 95%-99% of CO2 emissions with extremely low emissions, less waste, unprecedented solvent stability, and low energy requirements.

PROJECTS

Enterprise Pilot At Calpine’s Los Medanos Energy Center

• Pilot designed and built to ION’s specifications to demonstrate the performance of ICE-31 on a 1 MWe slipstream of NGCC flue gas from a commercially dispatched power plant in Pittsburg, CA, USA.

Tampa Electric Company’s Polk Power Station

• Working to complete a FEED study to design and determine the cost of retrofitting ION’s capture technology onto the NGCC power plant at the Polk Power Station Unit 2 (PK2).

ROADMAP

• 2021 (March to October)

  • Operated the third-generation solvent (ICE-31) at the NCCC for 6 months and over 4,200 hours to scale up from bench to pilot scale.

• 2023 - 2024

  • Tested their third-generation solvent (ICE-31) at TCM.

• Ongoing

  • Enterprise Pilot at Calpine's Los Medanos Energy Center (LMEC)
  • Demonstrated the performance of ICE-31 on a 1 MWe slipstream of NGCC flue gas (1 MWel) at 10 tpd capture rate.

Developing standard modular units: designed units for 100 to 500 KTPA industrial sources and custom designed large scale capture units for gas-fired power generation.

ION analyses existing or proposed facilities to determine precisely how their technology and services can help you achieve your carbon capture goals. This service includes:

• Performing costing studies

• Technical economic analyses

• Facilities evaluations for potential customers to gauge all of the necessary steps for effective CO2 capture

Process

• Removes CO2 from flue gas after fuel is burned.

• Absorption phase: Flue gas enters the absorption tower, where ION's liquid solvent absorbs the CO2. The CO2-free gas is safely released into the atmosphere.

• Regeneration phase: The CO2-laden solvent is heated to separate the CO2, which can be sequestered or repurposed. The solvent is then recycled back into the absorption tower for reuse.

Key aspects of the technology

• Their current technology readiness level (TRL) is 7.

• The system have an optimum carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration of 3 to 20% for the inlet.

• The energy consumption of the solution ranges 2.4 to 2.8 GJ/tCO2.

• Lab studies on ICE-31 show low degradation under extreme oxidative and thermal conditions, with heat-stable salts reclaimable via electrodialysis.

• Exceptionally stable solvent.

• Capture efficiency between 95%-99%.

ION's CO2 capture systems are designed for use by large point sources of emissions.

Primary applications are:

• Natural gas power plants

• Coal-fired power plants

The technology suite is also applicable to other industrial sources that include:

• Cement

• Mining

• Metals like iron and steel

• Petrochemicals

• Refineries

• Biomass

• Blue hydrogen