How to simulate co₂ capture + compression
Post-combustion capture recovers 90% of the flue CO₂, then a compressor and after-cooler condition it to pipeline pressure for storage/EOR — the real energy cost after capture.
Also known as: CO2 capture unit, carbon capture and compression.
- 1Open the ready-made model
Open the "CO₂ capture + compression" model in the MaximaLabs workspace — no install, no license. It loads live on the canvas, ready to edit and run.
- 2Confirm the thermodynamics
This process is modeled with the PENG-ROBINSON property package over co2, n2 — already selected, so the phase equilibrium and enthalpy are physically consistent from the first run.
- 3Review the flowsheet
The flowsheet chains ABS, COMP, COOL. Every block is a real, solvable unit op you can reconfigure on the canvas.
- 4Run the simulation
Click Run. The deterministic solver converges the material and energy balances (recycles included) and fills the live stream table — the AI never invents a number.
- 5Read the results and iterate
Inspect the converged streams, tweak a spec, and re-run — or ask the AI copilot to explain a result or diagnose a failed solve in plain English.
- Thermodynamics
- PENG-ROBINSON
- Components
- co2, n2
- Unit operations
- ABSCOMPCOOL
Opens live on the canvas — free, no install.
Explore the model & flowsheetFrequently asked questions
- What does the CO₂ capture + compression model simulate?
- Post-combustion capture recovers 90% of the flue CO₂, then a compressor and after-cooler condition it to pipeline pressure for storage/EOR — the real energy cost after capture.
- Is "CO₂ capture + compression" the same as a CO2 capture unit?
- Yes — this model covers what is also called CO2 capture unit, carbon capture and compression. It runs the real process on the rigorous solver, so you can size and study it directly.
- Which thermodynamic method does it use?
- The PENG-ROBINSON property package, over co2, n2 — already selected. You can switch the method on the canvas before running.
- Which unit operations are in the flowsheet?
- It chains ABS, COMP, COOL. Every block is a real, solvable unit operation you can reconfigure, add to, or remove.
- Do I need to install software or buy a license?
- No. CO₂ capture + compression runs entirely in your browser on MaximaLabs — free, no install, no license. Open the model to load it live and run the deterministic solver.
More guides like this
Post-combustion CO₂ capture
A separator recovers 90% of the CO₂ from a flue-gas stream — the sustainability layer then tracks the captured tonnes.
Wellhead compression: what the reservoir gives and what it costs to move
A gas well is not a feed whose flow you type in. The rate is an OUTCOME of how hard the facility pulls on the reservoir, and this example starts there. The well runs the Vogel inflow-performance relationship: at a 250 bar reservoir pressure and a 5e-5 mol/s/Pa productivity index its absolute open flow is J x p_r / 1.8 = 694 mol/s, and the fraction of that you actually get follows 1 - 0.2(p_wf/p_r) - 0.8(p_wf/p_r)^2. Holding 180 bar at the bottomhole delivers 306 mol/s, 44% of open flow. Squeeze to 150 bar and it rises to 411; back off to 240 and it collapses to 49. The curve is deliberately not a straight line — that curvature is why compression pays for itself, and why the last increment of drawdown buys less than the first. Compression is where the stage count earns its keep. Taking that gas from 30 to 150 bar in ONE stage lands the discharge at 508 K (235 C) — past what reciprocating machine valves and lube oil tolerate, before any efficiency argument. Split it into three with intercooling to 313 K and the discharge is 362 K; four stages give 349 K. The temperature, not the power, is what sets the stage count on a real machine. Read the reported duty carefully. duty on this unit is the NET of the compression work and the intercooler heat removed, summed into one number — it goes from +2094 kW at one stage to -384 kW at three, not because compression got cheaper but because there is now intercooling to subtract. It is not shaft power, and this example does not present it as such.
Sour-gas sweetening — six-category footprint
A fuel-fired feed-gas heater, acid-gas removal, and a VOC purge — vented to atmosphere — so the Sustainability panel shows all six impact categories at once: carbon, water, acidification (vented H₂S/NH₃ + combustion NOx), eutrophication (NH₃ + NOx), photochemical ozone (vented benzene) and cumulative energy demand. Illustrative screening vent compositions — a real plant Claus/incinerates the H₂S and controls the VOC rather than venting; the point is to exercise the multi-category footprint on a process that genuinely carries these species. Spec-based separators, so it converges fast and conserves mass.
High-CO2 LNG with amine capture and CO2 reinjection
One 5.3 Mtpa LNG train on a reservoir whose gas is 14 mol% CO₂, where the CO₂ is not vented but compressed to dense phase and injected — 2.8 Mtpa of it, at 200 bar, which is the scale that makes this a storage project rather than a gesture. Two things make this different from every other LNG example here. First, the acid-gas removal is real chemistry, in the same flowsheet as the cryogenics: per-node thermo_overrides run the absorber, the rich/lean loop and the stripper on the 'enrtl-mdea-pz' electrolyte package (MDEA protonation + piperazine carbamate/dicarbamate speciation) while the gas train and the cold end run Peng-Robinson — the amine unit and the MCHE are not two models bolted together, they are one solve. Second, the CO₂ goes somewhere: the stripper overhead is knocked back, two-stage compressed with interstage cooling and drying, and pumped to 200 bar as a ~96 mol% dense-phase stream ready for a reinjection well, rather than leaving as a vent. The sweet gas is water-washed, dried and liquefied in the C3MR cold end to LNG at ~116 K.
Direct air capture with solid-sorbent calcination + CO2 liquefaction
A Carbon Engineering-style DAC train: a fan draws ambient air (400 ppm CO₂) through a liquid-KOH contactor (a fixed-recovery separator — the same simplification the existing carbon-capture example uses for chemical absorption, since no CO₂-KOH electrolyte package exists) capturing ~75% of the CO₂. The captured CO₂ is causticized and precipitated into CaCO₃ pellets by the real (unmodeled-in-detail) KOH/Ca(OH)2 loop — represented here as a matched pellet feed sized to the captured CO₂ rate, since the generic reactor unit op can't itself produce a solid product (only a rotary kiln's decomposition path can, which is exactly what's used next). Those pellets calcine at ~977 degC in an indirectly-heated rotary kiln (real Arrhenius decomposition kinetics, Sullivan-Maynard-Valentine residence time), releasing pure CO₂ that's compressed to ~20 atm and chilled to 250 K — above the real Span-Wagner CO₂ saturation pressure at that temperature, so the solved outlet stream is genuine subcooled LIQUID CO₂ (not just dense-phase pipeline gas) — while the CaO leaves for slaking and reuse (the lime side of the closed loop, out of scope for the same reason as the causticization step). Run the Carbon Footprint report on this example for the real Scope 1/2/3 CO2e + carbon-tax liability breakdown already built into MaximaLabs's report generator.
Dense-phase CO₂ pipeline transport
Supercritical/dense-phase CO₂ loses pressure to pipe friction over a 150 km trunk-line run, gets restored by an intermediate pump station (the fluid stays liquid-like above its critical pressure, so this is a pump — not a compressor), then runs a second 150 km segment — the CCUS transport leg between capture and injection.