“Once tested and scaled up, Calix’s LEILAC technology should reduce the cost of carbon capture considerably and accelerate the deployment in the lime industry – enabling society to continue to benefit from this vital product without negatively impacting the environment.”
Ziad Habib, Global Director – Manufacturing Process Innovation, Lhoist
“The current objective facing the lime industry and governments is threefold: maintain economic prosperity, meet lime market demand, while dramatically lowering CO2 emissions. Calix (LEILAC) aims to meet this global challenge as quickly as possible.”
Adam Vincent, General Manager Lime Decarbonisation
Calix’s LEILAC technology involves grinding limestone to an average size of around 1/10th to 1/100th of a millimeter and then ‘flash’ heating the material in an externally heated reactor over a short period of time, thus converting the particles to lime. Specially selected steels allow the process temperature to reach in excess of 900 °C, which is required for the reaction. The evolved gas is high purity CO2, which can be captured and used or stored.
After the successful commissioning of a world-first pilot plant (LEILAC-1) in 2019, scale up of the technology will be demonstrated on LEILAC-2, where a 4-reactor module array is scheduled to be built by early 2024, with the aim to capture the CO2 from cement and lime processing in a suitable condition for storage.
The next stage of advancement for the processing of lime will focus on several key areas including maximising efficiency, scale up of throughput, testing of solid fuels, testing of alternate gaseous fuels such as hydrogen, scale up of Calix’s electric calciner for lime, fuel side CO2 capture options and optimising CO2 clean-up and compression. The ultimate aim is the production of zero CO2 lime.
More recently, and on the back of the knowledge built through years of research and development, Calix has teamed up with several companies to undergo feasibility and engineering studies for the development of Calix lime calciners with carbon dioxide capture capabilities.