Identification des produits de dégradation d’un solvant aminé régénérable permettant la capture de CO2

Global warming is one of the most important concerns of this century. It can be associated in major part to CO2 emissions into the atmosphere since the beginning of industrialization. The major CO2 emitters are motorized vehicles, coal heating and oil refineries. Some years ago, a scrubbing process started being used to reduce atmospheric emissions of CO2 from coal burning plants. This process is known as CO2 capture by regenerable amine-based solvents. As part of this master’s research, samples from an amine-based solvent that was subjected to CO2 capture for different amounts of time during the capture regeneration process were analyzed to determine the various degradation products formed from the capture solvent. Identification of the degradation products and their kinetics of formation allow optimization of the CO2 capture method, ideally to avoid their formation and to maximize the efficiency of the capture process over a longer period of use. Liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (LC-MS) was used to initially select various degradation products present in reasonable abundance. The use of high resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) allowed the identification of the most probable chemical formulas for the degradation products found in the capture solvent. Addition of a collision cell to HRMS provided more information on the different functional groups by MS fragmentation, and therefore more structural information on the unknown compounds. When there were a few possible structures for a single unknown compound, standards were used to compare the MS spectra obtained and confirm the structures. For the unknown compounds with too many plausible structures, additional analysis methods were used, like gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (GC-MS), ionic mobility mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) after fraction collection by preparative liquid chromatography. No degradation products were identified with 100 % certainty. The level of confidence towards proposed structures was quite high for some of the unknowns; however, the standards needed to confirm their identification were too costly to synthesize. This entire master’s project was carried out in collaboration with an industrial partner.  A secondary part of this master’s project involved the development of a method to detect and quantify two N-nitrosamines at a concentration of 1 µg/L. Validation of the method for the quantification of the two N-nitrosamines was also carried out. The two analytes were residues of the degradation process of a different amine-based CO2 capture solvent where the recommended concentration of the residues should be under 1 µg/L when releasing the wastewater into environmental waters (US Environnemental Protection Agency). It is therefore important to determine these N-nitrosamines to avoid contamination of water bodies. The developed method used solid-supported liquid-liquid extraction (SLE) for sample preparation and LC-MS for separation and quantification. The highest amount of one of the two N-nitrosamines found in the samples supplied by the industrial partner was 7.30 µg/L, which was over the recommended level.

Keyphrases: Mass spectrometry, CO2 capture, Liquid chromatography, Regenerable amine solvent, Analytical separations