The Future Of Carbon Capture?

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is thought to be a key technology in our search for ways to reduce our carbon emissions.

Unfortunately, CCS is in it's infancy and has yet to prove itself in terms of costs and scalability. Many a scheme has been abandoned before it has started, even when backed with promises of millions in subsidies from governments.

Yet it has huge potential: The company and/or country that develops a working, cost effective, large scale version of CCS will make a fortune from a world market that is desperate for a technology that means they can still get their energy from fossil fuels without producing carbon emissions.

Could U.S. company Net Power be the ones to do just that? (See here and here).

Their chief technologist, Rodney Allam, believes they can. Instead of focusing his attention on simply capturing waste CO2 from power stations after combustion (i.e. after burning the fuel), his idea is to make stations more efficient by using the CO2 in the combustion process. By doing this, they not get more energy from the same fuel, they also get much purer CO2 emissions that are far cheaper to capture.

End result: Power stations that cost no more than ones without CCS.

Net Power plan to trial the idea in Britain, with construction starting some time over the next year.


Could the revolution start here?

Norway Abandons Carbon Capture

A while ago I wrote here about Norway's attempts to become the go-to place for testing carbon capture and storage technology (CCS).

Unfortunately, that now appears to have gone belly-up due to spiralling costs and delays (See here).

That's a real shame because this is probably one of our most promising bets for stopping climate change.

I find it bizarre that the big fossil fuel companies, particularly in coal, aren't throwing everything at this technology as it may be the best hope their industry has of avoiding being phased out by the world's future attempts to tackle climate change.

Perhaps they're in denial?

Carbon Capture Made Easy?

Carbon capture might be one of most important tools we could have to combat climate change. Problem is it's not been fully developed yet. The reason for that is basically the cost. It's perfectly feasible to capture carbon at source (i.e. At the power stations) but it costs a fortune to do it and it reduces the efficiency of power station.

However, hope maybe at hand. Scientists studying sea urchins have discovered that they are very good at absorbing CO2. And they do that using nickel.

When the scientists tried adding nano particles of the metal to a solution of water and CO2 it captured all the CO2. The result can then be easily turned into calcium carbonate (chalk).

If this scales up to an industrial level, it has a number of exciting implications: Nickel is a lot cheaper than other substances currently used for carbon capture, substantially cutting the costs of the process; By turning the CO2 into a useful, stable product like chalk instead of storing the captured gas underground (where it could escape) or in the sea (where it would acidify the water), it's removed permanently; the nickel isn't lost with the chalk, it can easily be retrieved, and used to capture more CO2, further reducing the cost.

This could be the breakthrough carbon capture desperately needs.


Background article.

What Is Carbon Capture And Storage?

Over the coming months you are likely to hear the words "carbon capture and storage" (CCS) more and more. It is potentially a game changer when it comes to the battle to avoid climate change, but what exactly is it?

In basic terms, it's technology that can be used to capture carbon dioxide at power stations etc. before it is emitted into the atmosphere, then store it somewhere safe.

It matters because it can potentially stop the whole carbon emissions problem at source. What's more, in theory, it throws oil, natural gas, and coal producers a lifeline, as there'd no longer be the urgency to replace their products with the cleaner alternatives.

However, it's early days yet. The tech could be years away from being ready to scale up and use across the world. The reason being that it is inefficient, and too expensive to be commercially viable at the moment.

This is why, a week or so ago, Norway opened up a new carbon capture and storage (CCS) test facility at Mongstad: To try to push the technology along. The facility has the capability of testing several CCS techniques at a time and should prove invaluable. It joins over 40 such test and demo sites around the world.

Carbon Capture

There are 3 broad methods for capturing: Post-combustion, where chemicals are used to strip out the CO2 from the emissions; pre-combustion, where the fossil fuel is oxidized, producing a 'syngas' for fuel whilst the CO2 is available for capture; and oxy-fuel combustion where the fuel is burned in oxygen instead of air, and CO2 can be removed from the flue gases.

Storage

There are also a number of ways the CO2 can be stored.

• The first way is to store it deep underground e.g. in old oil/gas fields, exploiting the geology to keep the gas where it is. 

• A second, more controversial way, is to store it by various means in the oceans. As far as I'm concerned, that's a non-starter. If you simply dissolve the CO2 into the water, it would add to the growing problem of acidification. Other methods just leave the problem for later generations to deal with.

• Then there's converting the CO2 into carbonates (various forms of limestone), so trapping the carbon 'forever'. This has been shown to be possible but whether it can work on an industrial scale remains to be seen.

• A couple of other promising ideas are to use the CO2 to feed algae that produce oil for plastics and even aviation fuel (Although I think this last one just moves the problem along to somewhere that doesn't use CCS).

I see CCS as something that could make a major contribution to cutting CO2 if fitted to all new coal and gas power stations, and retro-fitted to all existing ones, plus any other major emitters. However, it will take a major effort to bring the costs down to a level where this is feasible. Somehow I think the fossil-fuel industry will find a way, don't you?