I'm no engineer; that said, I think you're being slightly unfair to the Carbon Engineering folks, as paper [3] that OP linked states that CE's design reflects "reflects roughly 100 person-years of development." That doesn't strike me as outrageous in this context (30 people working for ~40 months?), although I'll grant I don't have a ton of perspective on industrial process development.
That said, OP's idea does have merit. avernon, I think you hit the nail on the head with your comment downthread regarding the main concern being avoiding disruption to existing plant processes where this kind of tech might be installed - I would be worried specifically about how radically raising the pH of cooling process water would affect mineral deposition, for example, but then that in turn would surely depend on how a given plant had set up its cooling system to begin with.
Nevertheless, it seems very likely that this idea could in itself knock about $4/t off of the cost of CO2 relative to the CE estimate ($212M saved for their air contactor design amortized over 30Mt of CO2 captured during a CE plant lifetime) which in the best case is around 5% of the cost of the CO2 capture.
Since you are piggybacking on their system, you'd save on peripheral equipment costs and operating costs, too. The subsystems surrounding these cooling water systems are immense. They need river/lake access for water, giant pumps to feed the makeup water into the system, giant fans running all the time, and even larger pumps to circulate the cooling water after. There is a lot of nickel and dime complexity/cost in things like water purification. I'd be shocked if it only knocked 5% of the cost off.
Plus many facilities have surplus low pressure steam you could use to regenerate your fluid.
That said, OP's idea does have merit. avernon, I think you hit the nail on the head with your comment downthread regarding the main concern being avoiding disruption to existing plant processes where this kind of tech might be installed - I would be worried specifically about how radically raising the pH of cooling process water would affect mineral deposition, for example, but then that in turn would surely depend on how a given plant had set up its cooling system to begin with.
Nevertheless, it seems very likely that this idea could in itself knock about $4/t off of the cost of CO2 relative to the CE estimate ($212M saved for their air contactor design amortized over 30Mt of CO2 captured during a CE plant lifetime) which in the best case is around 5% of the cost of the CO2 capture.