CO2 conditioning of a high-purity source (ammonia CO2 stripper vent), compression and TEG drying

Sourced conceptual inventory per tonne of dense-phase CO2 at 15.3 MPa: the wet stripper-vent gas of an ammonia plant is compressed, dried with triethylene glycol and cooled, after the US NETL study of industrial capture (2023). No flowsheet; not reviewed.

Calculation maturity: not assessedDesign maturity: Concept (research)Not independently reviewedCarbon captureReport a problem with this process
Research outputNot engineering advice and not an approved design: do not use it for construction, operation or safety decisions. What this means

Sourced conceptual inventory per tonne of dense-phase CO2 at 15.3 MPa: the wet stripper-vent gas of an ammonia plant is compressed, dried with triethylene glycol and cooled, after the US NETL study of industrial capture (2023). No flowsheet; not reviewed.

Capacity
per tonne of conditioned CO2 (the dataset's basis); the source's case is 55.5 t/h

What goes in and out

In

  • Carbon dioxideFeedstockwet CO2 stripper (regenerator) vent of a natural-gas ammonia plant, 97.09 mol% CO2, 0.16 MPa; zero burden from the source plant (system-model section 2, step 4); fossil carbon
  • Triethylene glycolFeedstockmake-up of the TEG dryer, linked to ethylene-glycol-1 (lca/mappings.yaml)
  • WaterFeedstockcooling-tower make-up of the compressor coolers, withdrawn from nature

Out

  • Carbon dioxideMain productdense phase, 15.3 MPa and 30 degC, 99.95 mol% CO2 (500 ppm water), EOR pipeline quality
  • WastewaterWastewater knocked out of the raw gas and removed by the dryer
  • WastewaterWastecooling-tower blowdown (ASSUMED 4 cycles of concentration)
  • WaterEmissioncooling-tower evaporation

Utilities: Electricity (reciprocating CO2 compressor, circulating-water pumps and cooling-tower fans)

Show in the process graph

Life cycle assessment

No footprint assessed yet; the process is part of the life-cycle inventory below.

In the open LCI database (cheme-as-code-atlas-preview-a3c52e4) as Carbon dioxide, dense phase, >= 99.95 mol%, 153 bara Preliminary.

Download it for Brightway, openLCA and other tools.

In the LCI database: system model, datasets and KPIs against the benchmarks

In the LCI database

Status
Preliminary 2 unmapped exchanges. Some exchanges have no background mapping yet: they are exported unlinked and count no burden, so the inventory is incomplete.
System model
attributional, cut-off (methodology 1.1.0)
Allocation
mass (single-output, from default) · product:CO2 100 %
Allocation findings
none
Change report
Not available: this build has no change report against an earlier release.
Dataset pages
Carbon dioxide, dense phase, >= 99.95 mol%, 153 bara Preliminary

KPI benchmark positions

KPIValueReference rangePosition
Cooling-water make-up per t of CO2 conditioned
No open source independent of the dataset found (2026-11-05). The only figures read are NETL (2023), DOE/NETL-2023/3907, Exhibits 5-7 and 5-26: water consumable of the ammonia case (46,000 gal/d, 130.8 kg/t, the dataset itself) and the ethanol case (17,000 gal/d, 164.2 kg/t). They are the dataset's own source, so they are kept only as its uncertainty spread and not as a check. Read without a per-tonne make-up figure: McCollum and Ogden (2006) UCD-ITS-RR-06-14 (no cooling water), IPCC SRCCS (2005) ch. 3; a web search for open make-up water figures of CO2 compression intercooling found none stated per t of CO2.
– kg/tnot availablenot evaluated
Electricity per t of CO2 compressed (and dried) to pipeline pressure
No open source found (2026-11-05) that states a per-tonne electricity for compressing (and drying) high-purity CO2 to pipeline pressure independently of the dataset. Read: McCollum, D.L., Ogden, J.M. (2006) UCD-ITS-RR-06-14, section 'Calculation of Compressor & Pump Power Requirements', pp. 2-4, which prints the compressor and pump power equations and a figure of power against flow, but no per-tonne value. Evaluated by us with the parameter values it states (five stages from 0.1 to 7.38 MPa with their Z and k, inlet 40 degC, isentropic efficiency 0.75; pump from 7.38 to 15 MPa, 630 kg/m3, efficiency 0.75), it gives 100.4 kWh/t compression plus 4.5 kWh/t pumping, 104.8 kWh/t, without cooling-water power or drying. That is our own model evaluation, so it is not recorded as a range. NETL (2023) DOE/NETL-2023/3907 gives 105.6 kWh/t (ammonia, Exhibits 5-3 and 5-4: 5,860 kW over 55,488 kg/h) and 112.7 kWh/t (ethanol, Exhibits 5-22 and 5-23: 1,840 kW over 16,329 kg/h), divided by us; it is the dataset's own source, so it is not a check either. Both are kept as the dataset's uncertainty spread.
– kWh/tnot availablenot evaluated

Maturity and review

Design maturity Concept (claimed): An idea or first flowsheet; numbers are rough. No independent engineering review yet. Automated checks passing is not a review.

Calculation maturity, from the checked evidenceNot assessed

The process has no maturity report (cheme maturity, checks/maturity.json), so no calculation maturity is established.

No level shownThe design maturity (Concept) is the manifest's claim, not evidence. A level appears here once the process's repository holds a current report from cheme maturity --write.

Artifact completeness

Which deliverables exist. They never raise a calculation maturity level: a drawing from unchecked numbers is still unchecked.

Not reported without a maturity report.

Independent review

Not independently reviewed

No independent engineering review yet. Automated checks passing is not a review.

Set by people only. Reaching a calculation maturity level or passing automated checks is not an independent review or an approval.

Where the evidence comes from
Report
processes/carbon-capture-1/checks/maturity.json (not in the library)
Method
How ChemE-as-Code checks the levels (requirement by requirement)

Open items

0 open items · 0 closed

New action itemNew engineering holdNew technical queryNew design changeAll issues

Sources

Library version
a3c52e4 (process last changed in a3c52e4)
Data
Catalog record (JSON) · CC-BY-4.0
Files
View the files on GitHub · change history and authors

References

How to cite

For the data, cite the Process Atlas paper; for the platform that builds and checks it, the ChemE-as-Code paper.

Schweidtmann, A. M. & Weber, J. M. (2026, in preparation). Process Atlas: an open, git-native, reproducible library and life cycle inventory of chemical processes (working title).

For this process: "CO2 conditioning of a high-purity source (ammonia CO2 stripper vent), compression and TEG drying", ChemE-as-Code process library, version a3c52e4.

BibTeX
@unpublished{schweidtmann_process_atlas,
  author = {Schweidtmann, Artur M. and Weber, Jana M.},
  title = {{Process Atlas: an open, git-native, reproducible library and life cycle inventory of chemical processes (working title)}},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://atlas.cheme-as-code.org},
  note = {in preparation}
}

Schweidtmann, A. M. (2026). ChemE-as-Code: An Open-Source Platform for Agentic AI in Chemical Engineering. arXiv:2611.07947. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.07947

BibTeX
@misc{schweidtmann_cheme_as_code,
  author = {Schweidtmann, Artur M.},
  title = {{ChemE-as-Code: An Open-Source Platform for Agentic AI in Chemical Engineering}},
  year = {2026},
  eprint = {2611.07947},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2611.07947},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07947}
}