Carbon Dioxide Capture from Upstream Natural Gas: Potentials of Ionic Liquids (ILs) as Green Solvents

Natural gas (NG) is one of the major types of ‘fossil fuels’ which could be regarded as a primary energy source for domestic, automobiles and several industrial processes.The CO2 contents in NG vary widely in various gas fields of the world. Most recently, the composition of CO2 in natural gas has been found to be very high which ranges from 28 to 87 % in some of the Malaysian gas fields of Sarawak (Darman and Harun, 2006). As the production of NG from prevailing gas fields is expected to decline in a decade based on the current reserves. Therefore, there is a great need to pay more emphasis for the development of gas reserves with rich CO2 contents in order to sustain long term future energy challenges as the existing gas fields with low CO2 contents are rapidly depleting. This research project was carried out at Chemical Engineering of Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP) under graduate assistant-ship scheme and study leave from University of the Punjab during 2006-2009.