09-06-2025

Mitsubishi Electric to demonstrate CO2 capture machine developed by ITRI in Taiwan

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation announced today that it will launch a demonstration of technology to capture CO2 from flue gas, using a CO2 capture machine developed by the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) in Taiwan and installed at Mitsubishi Electric’s Advanced Technology R&D Center in Amagasaki, Hyogo Prefecture on June 9. The demonstration will last until September 2027.

In April 2024, Mitsubishi Electric and ITRI concluded a basic agreement to cooperate on research targeting sustainability technologies. Since then, they have been engaged in research and development aimed at mitigating climate change through carbon dioxide capture and utilization (CCU) technology. CCU separates and captures CO2 emitted from power plants and factories and then uses the recovered CO2 to produce fuel and chemical products.

In the demonstration, Mitsubishi Electric will connect the machine to a steam-generating boiler to test its effectiveness in capturing CO2 contained in boiler’s flue gas. The machine uses a solid adsorption method, whereby CO2 is adsorbed onto a solid adsorbent, which is then heated to release and recover the CO2 before CO2 reduction and other processes. Conventionally, CO2 from flue gas has been captured using liquid absorption. In this method, CO2 is absorbed by an aqueous solution of amine, a chemical substance mainly composed of nitrogen atoms that can absorb CO2 and release it when heated or decompressed. However, this method requires a large amount of energy to evaporate the aqueous solution, resulting in energy loss. The new solid adsorption method does not use this evaporation process, thereby reducing the energy required to capture CO2.