CyCurex® a Single Scrubber Additive for Elemental Mercury and Heavy Metals Sequestration

Cylenchar Limited’s CyCurex® is a generic reagent system for the remediation of toxic heavy metals contaminated materials. It can bind and stabilise a broad spectrum of heavy metals in a wide variety of substrates, and eliminate or reduce metals leaching to within internationally accepted regulatory limits, thereby preventing contamination of the environment.

Cylenchar has developed its technology to address heavy metals sequestration of combustion gases from coal fired power plants, cement kilns, waste incinerators, chemical waste combustion, exhaust gases from metals processing, and oil field off-gases. It can be deployed as an induct spray, dry scrubbing agent or simply piggy-backed into an existing wet-Flue Gas Desulphurization (FGD) system as a low level additive. Application methods involved are significantly lower cost than any dry sorbent injection system.

Process trials of CyCurex® were conducted at 1MW level in dry scrubber application with mercury spiked coal combustions gases, at the Southern Research Institute Combustion Research Centre at Birmingham Alabama.  Results showed that the technology can rapidly sequester both oxidised and elemental mercury at gas bound concentrations from 10 to 1,000µg/Nm3 in exposure times as low as one to two seconds and at dose levels making it highly cost competitive vs Powdered Activated Carbon technologies. Several full scale plant trials in wet-FGD systems have been undertaken in US coal fired power plants ranging from 400 to 750MW capacity and using a variety of coal types.  Stack discharges being primarily hard to capture elemental mercury were reduced by up to 88%.  

Cylenchar’s CyCurex® metals capture and sequestration technology has the following key benefits:

• Inorganic reagent, comparatively safe and non-toxic to handle, with no toxic degradation products.
• Suppresses mercury re-emission from wet-FGD systems.
• Retains over 98% of oxidized mercury, and simultaneously can capture >80% of elemental mercury – all with extremely low injection rates.
• Will work in tandem with mercury oxidant systems.
• In addition to mercury, it can capture and sequester a broad spectrum of heavy metals at the same time, including major pollutants of concern such as: arsenic, cadmium, chromium, nickel, selenium, lead and zinc.
• The system has no major water demands and creates little solid waste – if any
• Does not impair by-product gypsum quality, but reduces the metals leaching from gypsum, thereby improving product quality and de-risking by-product gypsum sold into wallboard and cement manufacture. Residues meet all TCLP standards, with leachable metals reduced by >40% and are stable during high temperature onward processing.
• Reduces soluble heavy metals in process waters by >30%, thus reducing downstream environmental impact and water treatment costs.
• Offers tremendous capital and operating cost savings over existing technologies.

Cylenchar’s CyCurex® technology is available for worldwide distribution from Cylenchar Limited, UK and for North America from Breen Energy Solutions LLC, Pittsburgh, PA under the DeMerc™ brand. 

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