01
Brief
Operating pressure, tower geometry, energy budget and corrosion limits became the search constraints.
Case · CO₂ capture · SOCAR
A drop-in solvent for refinery carbon capture.
SOCAR needed to cut emissions from refineries built to run for decades. ALAi designed a new solvent for the towers they already have.
67%
of CO₂ captured at 15 bar.
43%
less energy to regenerate.
$15M
a year in savings per refinery.
$0
new equipment.
The constraint
Same tower. Better chemistry.
Refineries strip CO₂ from gas streams with amine solvents. Amines corrode the equipment, degrade, need frequent replacement and take a lot of heat to release the captured carbon. Replacing the towers was never on the table.
Runs in the existing absorber
Works at 15 bar
Less regeneration energy
Less corrosive than amines
What ALAi did
From 405,891 candidates to 8.
ALAi's pipeline generated ionic liquids against SOCAR's operating limits, scored them with property models tuned for that chemical family, and narrowed to eight finalists worth testing.
405,891→1,470→8
Molecules generated·Ranked·Finalists
02
Discover
405,891 ionic liquids generated and scored. Anything unsafe or impossible to make at scale was cut early.
03
Validate
URV in Spain independently reproduced ALAi's predictions with 95% accuracy.
04
Simulate the refinery
SOCAR ran the lead molecule through its digital twin of the STAR refinery: 67% capture at 15 bar.
Our team was admittedly skeptical. After running our quantum modeling, we were genuinely astonished.Dr. Alberto Puga · URV, Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Capture performance simulated on SOCAR's Aspen digital twin of the STAR refinery. Energy and savings figures from SOCAR's own modeling. Accuracy reproduced by URV against quantum modeling.