Absorptive separation for resource utilization by selective SO2 removal from flue gas is a potential method appli-cable in practice. A flue gas desulfurization process for SO2 utilization by selective absorption in a lab-scale absorption tower at atmospheric pressure using N-formylmorpholine (NFM) as the absorbent is developed to capture and concentrate the SO2 from flue gas, in which the CO2 content is several orders higher than that of SO2. The investigation of the effects of different operating conditions on the SO2 removal efficiency shows that the SO2 removal efficiency can be obviously enhanced by in-creasing NFM concentration, or decreasing the absorption temperature, the superficial gas velocity, the gas-liquid ratio, or the SO2 concentration in absorption solution. Under the optimum operating conditions (covering a temperature of 40 °C, a super-ficial gas velocity of <0.0165 m/s, a gas-liquid ratio of 200—250, a SO2 concentration in lean NFM solution of 0—10 mg/L, and a NFM concentration of 3 mol/L), the SO2 removal rate reaches over 99.5% while the absorption of CO2 is negligible. Similarly, the SO2 removal rate is as high as 99.5% obtained in consecutive absorption-desorption cycles. Desorption ex-periment results indicate that the absorption of sulfur dioxide is completely reversible and the release of SO2 from NFM is very easy and rapid at 104 °C. The absorption simulation result for desulfurization of flue gas vented from the industrial catalytic cracking regenerator shows that 98.0% of SO2 can be absorbed in the absorber and most of them are released in the desorber. The experimental and simulated results show that the desulfurization ability and regenerability of NFM solution is encouraging for the development of FGD process to capture the SO2 from flue gas.