High heat duty is an urgent challenge for industrial applications of amine-based CO2 capture. In this work, we report a novel, stable, efficient, and inexpensive Ni-HZSM-5 catalyst to reduce the heat duty. The density functional theory (DFT) calculations successfully explain the catalytic performance. The catalytic activity associates with the combined properties of MSA × B/L × Ni2+. The 7.85-Ni-HZ catalyst presents an excellent catalytic activity for the CO2 desorption: it increases the amount of desorbed CO2 up to 36%, reduces the heat duty by 27.07% compared with the blank run, and possesses high stability during five cyclic tests. A possible catalytic mechanism for the Ni-HZSM-5 catalysts through assisting carbamate breakdown and promoting CO2 desorption is proposed based on experimental results and theoretical calculations. Therefore, the results present that the 7.85-Ni-HZ catalyst significantly accelerates the protons transfer in CO2 desorption and can potentially apply in industrial CO2 capture.

The process of CO2 capture by aqueous amine-based captured is considered as the most the mature and applicable post-combustion CO2 capture method. However, with the CO2 capture process running for a long time, the degradation of aqueous amine-based is inevitable, and the degradation products are numerous and complicated. So, the performance evaluation of aqueous amine solutions containing degradation product is crucial in both guiding the selective removal of degradation products and maintaining or reducing of solution cyclic utilization rate. Unfortunately, a simple and effective way to increase the economic feasibility of CO2 capture process after accumulated degradation products remains absent, and little attention has been paid to the real effect of degradation products on the CO2 capture performance in aqueous amine solutions. In this work, we propose a simple method to evaluate the performance and regeneration energy of aqueous monoethanolamine (MEA) solutions accumulating single degradation products based on the fast-bubbling reactor. Using this method, it is possible to quickly determine the key degradation products that affecting the performance of aqueous MEA solution, so as to achieving clearer optimization, more direct purification, and reduced solution cyclic utilization rate.