Difference between revisions of "CCS"

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[[Category: EXPORT]]
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[[Category:2]]
[[Category: CO2]]
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[[Category: CCS]]
[[Category: Mitigation]]
 
[[Category: Geoengineering]]
 
[[Category: Energy]]
 
  
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is the term describing technologies for capturing the CO2 that would otherwise be emitted by burning fuels containing carbon: fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas, and [[Biofuels]] (where it is referred to as BECCS - Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage).
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Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is one of the groups of clean energy technologies, along with [[Renewable energy|renewables]] and [[nuclear energy]], which the [[IPCC]], [[International Energy Agency]] and others find to be necessary for effective climate mitigation. The UK's [[Committee on climate change]] also finds that there is no credible pathway to net zero without CCS.
  
The 5th IPCC Assessment Report finds CCS and BECCS to be vital technologies for AGW mitigation.
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The term CCS refers to technologies for capturing {{CO2}} that would otherwise be emitted to the atmosphere, and transporting it to a suitable location for permanent storage.
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The related term Carbon Capture and Utilisation (CCU) refers to using the captured {{CO2}} in other processes rather than sequestering it.
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Sometimes CCU and CCS are grouped together as "CCUS".
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Big sources of {{CO2}} – and attractive targets for CCUS projects – are the burning of fuels containing carbon: fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas, and [[Biofuels]], (where it is referred to as BECCS - Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage). It can also be used where {{CO2}} is emitted by other processes, such as [[#cement | cement]], steel, fertiliser, and glass production.
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It is claimed<ref>
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[[20191216 SF PAWS CCS|CCS presentation by Suzie Ferguson]]
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</ref>
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that CCS can:
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* reduce {{CO2}} emissions from existing or new fossil fuel power stations by &gt;90%
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* decarbonise domestic heating and vehicles via use of [[Hydrogen]] at greater scale and lower cost than via renewably powered electrolysis
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* capture {{CO2}} directly from the air using energy to reduce {{CO2}} concentration in the atmosphere
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* achieve carbon negative electricity production when applied to [[biomass]]
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----
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''See also''
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* [[20191216 SF PAWS CCS | Presentation on CCS by Suzie Ferguson, Dec 2019]]
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* [[H21 North of England]] project to use CCS to decarbonise the UK gas network
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* [[Decarbonising heating in Britain]] editorial referencing [[H21 North of England]] project
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* All articles in the category [[:Category:CCS | CCS]]
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== How CCS works ==
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"Full chain" CCS comprises:
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# Capture:
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#* Post-combustion
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#* Pre-combustion
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#* Oxy-combustion
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# Transport:
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#* pipeline
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#* ship
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# Storage:
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#* depleted reservoirs
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#* Saline Aquifers
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#* Enhanced oil recovery<ref>
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Although enhanced oil recovery is associated with {{CO2}} emissions from the fossil fuels so recovered (if they are burned without CCS), the {{CO2}} used for recovery is deposited in the reservoirs.
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</ref>
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=== Post-combustion capture ===
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{{CO2}} is captured from the flue gases of power stations, or other industrial processes such as manufacture of steel, cement, glass etc.
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The most proven technologies are based on solvents such as [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amine Amines], which have been used successfully and safely for decades, although other technologies are under investigation and development.
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=== Pre-combustion capture ===
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In this technology a carbon-based fuel (e.g. coal or gas) is first processed to produce, typically, {{CO2}} and Hydrogen. The {{CO2}} is captured and the Hydrogen is used as fuel which can be burned cleanly.
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=== Oxy-combustion ===
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In post-combustion capture the concentration of {{CO2}} in flue gases of, say, a power station, is typically around 4%. The flue gases also contain a lot of Nitrogen and its oxides (which can also be greenhouse gases), which came from the air which the fuel was burned in. In the oxy-combustion process oxygen is first separated from the air and used to burn the fuel. The flue gases then contain no Nitrogen or its oxides, and a much higher proportion of {{CO2}} which is easier to capture.
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The Allam cycle takes this further and uses the {{CO2}}-rich flue gas directly as a working fluid to drive a turbine, rather than heating water to generate steam to drive turbines.
  
 
== Expert assessments ==
 
== Expert assessments ==
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[https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/special-reports/srccs/srccs_wholereport.pdf Carbon Capture and Storage] Bert Metz, Ogunlade Davidson, Heleen de Coninck, Manuela Loos, Leo Meyer; IPCC WGIII; 2005
 
[https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/special-reports/srccs/srccs_wholereport.pdf Carbon Capture and Storage] Bert Metz, Ogunlade Davidson, Heleen de Coninck, Manuela Loos, Leo Meyer; IPCC WGIII; 2005
  
: The mandate of the report [] included the assessment of the technological maturity, the technical and economic potential to contribute to mitigation of climate change, and the costs. It also included legal and regulatory issues, public perception, environmental impacts and safety as well as issues related to inventories and accounting of greenhouse gas emission reductions. This report primarily assesses literature published after the Third Assessment Report (2001) on CO2 sources, capture systems, transport and various storage mechanisms. It does not cover biological carbon sequestration by land use, land use change and forestry, or by fertilization of oceans. The report builds upon the contribution of Working Group III to the Third Assessment Report Climate Change 2001 (Mitigation), and on the Special Report on Emission Scenarios of 2000, with respect to CO2 capture and storage in a portfolio of mitigation options. It identifies those gaps in knowledge that would need to be addressed in order to facilitate large-scale deployment.
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{{Quote|The mandate of the report [] included the assessment of the technological maturity, the technical and economic potential to contribute to mitigation of climate change, and the costs. It also included legal and regulatory issues, public perception, environmental impacts and safety as well as issues related to inventories and accounting of greenhouse gas emission reductions. This report primarily assesses literature published after the Third Assessment Report (2001) on CO2 sources, capture systems, transport and various storage mechanisms. It does not cover biological carbon sequestration by land use, land use change and forestry, or by fertilization of oceans. The report builds upon the contribution of Working Group III to the Third Assessment Report Climate Change 2001 (Mitigation), and on the Special Report on Emission Scenarios of 2000, with respect to CO2 capture and storage in a portfolio of mitigation options. It identifies those gaps in knowledge that would need to be addressed in order to facilitate large-scale deployment.}}
  
 
[http://www.iea.org/topics/ccs/ Carbon Capture and Storage] IEA
 
[http://www.iea.org/topics/ccs/ Carbon Capture and Storage] IEA
: Current short-, medium- and long-term projections for global energy demand still point to fossil fuels being combusted in quantities incompatible with levels required to stabilise greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations at safe levels in the atmosphere. All technologies along the CCS chain are known. They have been in operation in various industries for decades, although at relatively small scale. However, for the sole purpose of limiting climate change, these technologies have been put together in industrial scale (>1Mt CO2 captured and stored per year) in only a small number of installations.  
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{{Quote|Current short-, medium- and long-term projections for global energy demand still point to fossil fuels being combusted in quantities incompatible with levels required to stabilise greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations at safe levels in the atmosphere. All technologies along the CCS chain are known. They have been in operation in various industries for decades, although at relatively small scale. However, for the sole purpose of limiting climate change, these technologies have been put together in industrial scale (>1Mt {{CO2}} captured and stored per year) in only a small number of installations.}}
  
 
== General resources ==
 
== General resources ==
  
 
[https://energy.gov/fe/science-innovation/carbon-capture-and-storage-research CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE RESEARCH] ENERGY.GOV Office of Fossil Energy
 
[https://energy.gov/fe/science-innovation/carbon-capture-and-storage-research CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE RESEARCH] ENERGY.GOV Office of Fossil Energy
: Since 1997, Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy’s Carbon Storage program has significantly advanced the carbon capture and storage (CCS) knowledge base through a diverse portfolio of applied research projects. The portfolio includes industry cost-shared technology development projects, university research grants, collaborative work with other national laboratories, and research conducted in-house through the National Energy Technology Laboratory’s (NETL) Research and Innovation Center.
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{{Quote|
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Since 1997, Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy’s Carbon Storage program has significantly advanced the carbon capture and storage (CCS) knowledge base through a diverse portfolio of applied research projects. The portfolio includes industry cost-shared technology development projects, university research grants, collaborative work with other national laboratories, and research conducted in-house through the National Energy Technology Laboratory’s (NETL) Research and Innovation Center.
  
: The Carbon Storage Program is administered by the FE Office of Clean Coal and Carbon Management. The primary focus of the Program going forward is on early-stage R&D to develop coupled simulation tools, characterization methods, and monitoring technologies that will improve storage efficiency, reduce overall cost and project risk, decrease subsurface uncertainties, and identify ways to ensure that operations are safe, economically viable, and environmentally benign.
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The Carbon Storage Program is administered by the FE Office of Clean Coal and Carbon Management. The primary focus of the Program going forward is on early-stage R&D to develop coupled simulation tools, characterization methods, and monitoring technologies that will improve storage efficiency, reduce overall cost and project risk, decrease subsurface uncertainties, and identify ways to ensure that operations are safe, economically viable, and environmentally benign.
  
: Key Program goals include:
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Key Program goals include:
  
:* Determining the CO2 storage resource potential of on and offshore oil, gas, and saline bearing formations
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* Determining the {{CO2}} storage resource potential of on and offshore oil, gas, and saline bearing formations
:* Improving carbon storage efficiency and security by advancing new and early-stage monitoring tools and models
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* Improving carbon storage efficiency and security by advancing new and early-stage monitoring tools and models
:* Improving capabilities to evaluate and manage environmental risks and uncertainty through integrated risk-based strategic monitoring and mitigation protocols
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* Improving capabilities to evaluate and manage environmental risks and uncertainty through integrated risk-based strategic monitoring and mitigation protocols
:* Disseminating findings and lessons learned to the broader CCS community and key stakeholders
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* Disseminating findings and lessons learned to the broader CCS community and key stakeholders
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}}
  
 
[https://sequestration.mit.edu/ Carbon Capture & Storage Technologies @ MIT]
 
[https://sequestration.mit.edu/ Carbon Capture & Storage Technologies @ MIT]
: There are two primary types of carbon sequestration. Our program focuses on carbon dioxide capture and storage, where carbon dioxide is captured at its source (e.g., power plants, industrial processes) and subsequently stored in non-atmospheric reservoirs (e.g., depleted oil and gas reservoirs, unmineable coal seams, deep saline formations, deep ocean). The other type of carbon sequestration focuses on enhancing natural processes to increase the removal of carbon from the atmosphere (e.g., forestation).
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{{Quote|There are two primary types of carbon sequestration. Our program focuses on carbon dioxide capture and storage, where carbon dioxide is captured at its source (e.g., power plants, industrial processes) and subsequently stored in non-atmospheric reservoirs (e.g., depleted oil and gas reservoirs, unmineable coal seams, deep saline formations, deep ocean). The other type of carbon sequestration focuses on enhancing natural processes to increase the removal of carbon from the atmosphere (e.g., forestation).}}
  
 
[http://sequestration.mit.edu/pdf/enclyclopedia_of_energy_article.pdf Carbon Capture and Storage from Fossil Fuel Use] Howard Herzog, Dan Golomb; Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Energy and the Environment
 
[http://sequestration.mit.edu/pdf/enclyclopedia_of_energy_article.pdf Carbon Capture and Storage from Fossil Fuel Use] Howard Herzog, Dan Golomb; Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Energy and the Environment
: Contribution to Encyclopedia of Energy, to be published 2004
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{{Quote|
: Carbon sequestration can be defined as the capture and secure storage of carbon that would otherwise be emitted to, or remain, in the atmosphere. The focus of this paper is the removal of CO2 directly from industrial or utility plants and subsequently storing it in secure reservoirs. We call this carbon capture and storage (CCS). The rationale for carbon capture and storage is to enable the use of fossil fuels while reducing the emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere, and thereby mitigating global climate change. The storage period should exceed the estimated peak periods of fossil fuel exploitation, so that if CO2 re-emerges into the atmosphere, it should occur past the predicted peak in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Removing CO2 from the atmosphere by increasing its uptake in soils and vegetation (e.g., afforestation) or in the ocean (e.g., iron fertilization), a form of carbon sequestration sometimes referred to as enhancing natural sinks, will only be addressed briefly.  
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Contribution to Encyclopedia of Energy, to be published 2004
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Carbon sequestration can be defined as the capture and secure storage of carbon that would otherwise be emitted to, or remain, in the atmosphere. The focus of this paper is the removal of {{CO2}} directly from industrial or utility plants and subsequently storing it in secure reservoirs. We call this carbon capture and storage (CCS). The rationale for carbon capture and storage is to enable the use of fossil fuels while reducing the emissions of {{CO2}} into the atmosphere, and thereby mitigating global climate change. The storage period should exceed the estimated peak periods of fossil fuel exploitation, so that if {{CO2}} re-emerges into the atmosphere, it should occur past the predicted peak in atmospheric {{CO2}} concentrations. Removing {{CO2}} from the atmosphere by increasing its uptake in soils and vegetation (e.g., afforestation) or in the ocean (e.g., iron fertilization), a form of carbon sequestration sometimes referred to as enhancing natural sinks, will only be addressed briefly.  
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}}
  
 
[https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/can-we-bury-carbon-dioxide-problem Can we bury the carbon dioxide problem?] Cosmos magazine; 11 Feb 2016
 
[https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/can-we-bury-carbon-dioxide-problem Can we bury the carbon dioxide problem?] Cosmos magazine; 11 Feb 2016
 
: Overview of CCS methods and current practical work
 
: Overview of CCS methods and current practical work
 
: ''paywalled''
 
: ''paywalled''
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[http://www.imeche.org/news/news-article/ipcc-climate-change-report----the-joy-of-beccs IPCC Climate Change report -- the joy of BECCS?] Matt Rooney; IMechE; 15 Oct 2018
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{{Quote|One of the technologies highlighted in the [IPCC SR15] report is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). The Institution’s Engineering Policy Adviser, Matt Rooney, examines this controversial approach to climate change mitigation.}}
  
 
== Post-combustion capture ==
 
== Post-combustion capture ==
  
 
[http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.5b03052?journalCode=esthag Reassessing the Efficiency Penalty from Carbon Capture in Coal-Fired Power Plants]
 
[http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.5b03052?journalCode=esthag Reassessing the Efficiency Penalty from Carbon Capture in Coal-Fired Power Plants]
:This paper examines thermal efficiency penalties and greenhouse gas as well as other pollutant emissions associated with pulverized coal (PC) power plants equipped with postcombustion CO2 capture for carbon sequestration. We find that, depending on the source of heat used to meet the steam requirements in the capture unit, retrofitting a PC power plant that maintains its gross power output (compared to a PC power plant without a capture unit) can cause a drop in plant thermal efficiency of 11.3–22.9%-points. This estimate for efficiency penalty is significantly higher than literature values and corresponds to an increase of about 5.3–7.7 US¢/kWh in the levelized cost of electricity (COE) over the 8.4 US¢/kWh COE value for PC plants without CO2 capture. The results follow from the inclusion of mass and energy feedbacks in PC power plants with CO2 capture into previous analyses, as well as including potential quality considerations for safe and reliable transportation and sequestration of CO2. We conclude that PC power plants with CO2 capture are likely to remain less competitive than natural gas combined cycle (without CO2 capture) and on-shore wind power plants, both from a levelized and marginal COE point of view.
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{{Quote|This paper examines thermal efficiency penalties and greenhouse gas as well as other pollutant emissions associated with pulverized coal (PC) power plants equipped with postcombustion {{CO2}} capture for carbon sequestration. We find that, depending on the source of heat used to meet the steam requirements in the capture unit, retrofitting a PC power plant that maintains its gross power output (compared to a PC power plant without a capture unit) can cause a drop in plant thermal efficiency of 11.3–22.9%-points. This estimate for efficiency penalty is significantly higher than literature values and corresponds to an increase of about 5.3–7.7 US¢/kWh in the levelized cost of electricity (COE) over the 8.4 US¢/kWh COE value for PC plants without {{CO2}} capture. The results follow from the inclusion of mass and energy feedbacks in PC power plants with {{CO2}} capture into previous analyses, as well as including potential quality considerations for safe and reliable transportation and sequestration of {{CO2}}. We conclude that PC power plants with {{CO2}} capture are likely to remain less competitive than natural gas combined cycle (without {{CO2}} capture) and on-shore wind power plants, both from a levelized and marginal COE point of view.}}
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== Allam Cycle ==
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'''Demonstration of the Allam Cycle: An Update on the Development Status of a High Efficiency Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Power Process Employing Full Carbon Capture'''
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by Rodney Allam, Scott Martin, Brock Forrest, Jeremy Fetvedt, Xijia Lu, David Freed, G. William Brown Jr., Takashi Sasaki, Masao Itoh, James Manning
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in Energy Procedia / 13th International Conference on Greenhouse Gas Control Technologies, GHGT-13, 14-18 November 2016, Lausanne, Switzerland
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in 2017
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[[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319196020_Demonstration_of_the_Allam_Cycle_An_Update_on_the_Development_Status_of_a_High_Efficiency_Supercritical_Carbon_Dioxide_Power_Process_Employing_Full_Carbon_Capture [article]]
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[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bill_Brown14/publication/319196020_Demonstration_of_the_Allam_Cycle_An_Update_on_the_Development_Status_of_a_High_Efficiency_Supercritical_Carbon_Dioxide_Power_Process_Employing_Full_Carbon_Capture/links/5a5bc9f6458515450278a2cc/Demonstration-of-the-Allam-Cycle-An-Update-on-the-Development-Status-of-a-High-Efficiency-Supercritical-Carbon-Dioxide-Power-Process-Employing-Full-Carbon-Capture.pdf?origin=publication_detail [PDF]]
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{{Quote|The Allam cycle is a novel {{CO2}}, oxy-fuel power cycle that utilizes hydrocarbon fuels while inherently capturing approximately 100% of atmospheric emissions, including nearly all {{CO2}} emissions at a cost of electricity that is highly competitive with the best available energy production systems that do not employ {{CO2}} capture. The proprietary system achieves these results through a semi-closed-loop, high-pressure, low-pressure-ratio recuperated Brayton cycle that uses supercritical {{CO2}} as the working fluid, dramatically reducing energy losses compared to steam- and air-based cycles. In conventional cycles, the separation and removal of low concentration combustion derived impurities such as {{CO2}} results in a large additional capital cost and increased parasitic power. As a result, removal in conventional cycles can increase the cost of electricity by 50% to 70%. The compelling economics of the Allam Cycle are driven by high target efficiencies, 59% net for natural gas and 51% net for coal (LHV basis) while inherently capturing nearly 100% {{CO2}} at pipeline pressure with low projected capital and O&M costs. Additionally, for a small reduction in performance the cycle can run substantially water free. The system employs only a single turbine, utilizes a small plant footprint, and requires smaller and fewer components than conventional hydrocarbon fueled systems. The Allam Cycle was first presented at GHGT-11. Since then, significant progress has been made, including detailed system design, component testing and the construction of a 50 MWth demonstration plant commencing in Q1 2016 and now entering commissioning as of Q4 2016. This paper will review the development status of the Allam Cycle; for the demonstration plant, the construction and commissioning status, schedule, key components, layout, and detailed design; turbine design, manufacturing status; development of a novel dynamic control system and control simulator for the demonstration plant; and other key aspects of the cycle. It will provide an update on the progress of the gasified solid fuel Allam Cycle and then address the overall Allam Cycle commercialization program, benefits and applications, and the expected design of the natural gas 300 MWe commercial NET Power plant projected for 2020.}}
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'''Utility Builds Zero-Carbon Gas Power Plants'''
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by Irina Slav
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in OilPrice.com
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on 23 Jul 2019
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[[https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Utility-Builds-Zero-Carbon-Gas-Power-Plants.html [article]]
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{{Quote|
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NET Power, a utility set up in 2010, is building zero-carbon natural gas-fired power plants in the United States and abroad and plans on making them cheap enough in the future to compete with traditional fossil fuel power plants.
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Forbes’s Jeff McMachon reports that the company revealed its multiple projects, which involve carbon capture, at a workshop organized by the National Laboratories of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
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"We have multiple 300MW-scale commercial projects in development," Adam Goff, a senior executive at NET Power’s parent company, 8 Rivers Capital, said. "None of them are announced yet, but we’ve got a couple in the U.S. and then some in Canada, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East and Europe—the regions of the world where we have interest in developing these projects."
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According to its website, NET Power generates cheaper electricity than traditional fossil fuel-powered facilities by utilizing a proprietary thermodynamic cycle called the Allam Cycle. The cycle, the company said, allows for the elimination of all emissions, including those of carbon dioxide.
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Any carbon dioxide produced in the process of burning the natural gas to power the turbines is in the form of a “high-pressure, high-quality byproduct, ready for pipeline transportation and storage.” Moreover, the company uses this high-pressure {{CO2}} instead of the heat used in traditional power plants to spin the turbine.
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}}
  
 
== Scale required ==
 
== Scale required ==
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[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/10/13/were-placing-far-too-much-hope-in-pulling-carbon-dioxide-out-of-the-air-scientists-warn/ We’re placing far too much hope in pulling carbon dioxide out of the air, scientists warn] Chelsea Harvey; Washington Post; 13 Oct 2016
 
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/10/13/were-placing-far-too-much-hope-in-pulling-carbon-dioxide-out-of-the-air-scientists-warn/ We’re placing far too much hope in pulling carbon dioxide out of the air, scientists warn] Chelsea Harvey; Washington Post; 13 Oct 2016
: In the past decade, an ambitious — but still mostly hypothetical — technological strategy for meeting our global climate goals has grown prominent in scientific discussions. Known as “negative emissions,” the idea is to remove carbon dioxide from the air using various technological means, a method that could theoretically buy the world more time when it comes to reducing our overall greenhouse-gas emissions. Recent models of future climate scenarios have assumed that this technique will be widely used in the future. Few have explored a world in which we can keep the planet’s warming within at least a 2-degree temperature threshold without the help of negative-emission technologies. But some scientists are arguing that this assumption may be a serious mistake.   
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{{Quote|
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In the past decade, an ambitious — but still mostly hypothetical — technological strategy for meeting our global climate goals has grown prominent in scientific discussions. Known as “negative emissions,” the idea is to remove carbon dioxide from the air using various technological means, a method that could theoretically buy the world more time when it comes to reducing our overall greenhouse-gas emissions. Recent models of future climate scenarios have assumed that this technique will be widely used in the future. Few have explored a world in which we can keep the planet’s warming within at least a 2-degree temperature threshold without the help of negative-emission technologies. But some scientists are arguing that this assumption may be a serious mistake.   
  
: In a new opinion paper, published Thursday in the journal Science, climate experts Kevin Anderson of the University of Manchester and Glen Peters of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research have argued that relying on the uncertain concept of negative emissions as a fix could lock the world into a severe climate-change pathway. “[If] we behave today like we’ve got these get-out-of-jail cards in the future, and then in 20 years we discover we don’t have this technology, then you’re already locked into a higher temperature level,” Peters said. Many possible negative-emission technologies have been proposed, from simply planting more forests (which act as carbon sinks) to designing chemical reactions that physically take the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The technology most widely included in the models is known as bioenergy combined with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS.
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In a new opinion paper, published Thursday in the journal Science, climate experts Kevin Anderson of the University of Manchester and Glen Peters of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research have argued that relying on the uncertain concept of negative emissions as a fix could lock the world into a severe climate-change pathway. “[If] we behave today like we’ve got these get-out-of-jail cards in the future, and then in 20 years we discover we don’t have this technology, then you’re already locked into a higher temperature level,” Peters said. Many possible negative-emission technologies have been proposed, from simply planting more forests (which act as carbon sinks) to designing chemical reactions that physically take the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The technology most widely included in the models is known as bioenergy combined with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS.
  
: First, the sheer amount of bioenergy fuel required to suit the models’ assumptions already poses a problem, Peters told The Washington Post. Most of the models assume a need for an area of land at least the size of India, he said, which prompts the question of whether this would reduce the area available for food crops or force additional deforestation, which would produce more carbon emissions.
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First, the sheer amount of bioenergy fuel required to suit the models’ assumptions already poses a problem, Peters told The Washington Post. Most of the models assume a need for an area of land at least the size of India, he said, which prompts the question of whether this would reduce the area available for food crops or force additional deforestation, which would produce more carbon emissions.
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}}
  
 
== US ==
 
== US ==
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[http://ww2.kqed.org/science/2016/01/24/despite-millions-in-investment-carbon-capture-flops-in-california/ Carbon Capture Flops in California Despite Millions in Investment] Lauren Sommer; KQED Science; 24 Jan 2016
 
[http://ww2.kqed.org/science/2016/01/24/despite-millions-in-investment-carbon-capture-flops-in-california/ Carbon Capture Flops in California Despite Millions in Investment] Lauren Sommer; KQED Science; 24 Jan 2016
despite millions in government investment, “carbon capture and storage,” as it’s called, has largely flopped in California. Faced with high costs and public opposition, several projects have failed to move beyond the planning stage.
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{{Quote|despite millions in government investment, “carbon capture and storage,” as it’s called, has largely flopped in California. Faced with high costs and public opposition, several projects have failed to move beyond the planning stage.}}
  
 
[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-13/southern-s-6-9-billion-clean-coal-plant-produces-first-power Southern’s $6.9 Billion Clean Coal Plant Produces First Power] Mark Chediak; Bloomberg; 13 Oct 2016  
 
[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-13/southern-s-6-9-billion-clean-coal-plant-produces-first-power Southern’s $6.9 Billion Clean Coal Plant Produces First Power] Mark Chediak; Bloomberg; 13 Oct 2016  
: Southern Co.’s $6.9 billion “clean coal” power plant in Mississippi produced electricity for the first time. The Kemper station used synthetic natural gas, converted from Mississippi lignite coal, to produce its first batch of power, Southern’s Mississippi Power utility said in a statement Wednesday. The generation brings Southern a step closer to placing the plant into full commercial operations after years of delays and cost overruns. Once in service, it’ll be the first large-scale power plant in the U.S. to gasify coal and capture carbon before it’s released into the atmosphere. The U.S. Department of Energy provided $245 million in a grants for the project, which the coal industry had been banking on as a potential way toward developing cleaner-burning technologies as pollution limits take hold.
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{{Quote|Southern Co.’s $6.9 billion “clean coal” power plant in Mississippi produced electricity for the first time. The Kemper station used synthetic natural gas, converted from Mississippi lignite coal, to produce its first batch of power, Southern’s Mississippi Power utility said in a statement Wednesday. The generation brings Southern a step closer to placing the plant into full commercial operations after years of delays and cost overruns. Once in service, it’ll be the first large-scale power plant in the U.S. to gasify coal and capture carbon before it’s released into the atmosphere. The U.S. Department of Energy provided $245 million in a grants for the project, which the coal industry had been banking on as a potential way toward developing cleaner-burning technologies as pollution limits take hold.}}
  
 
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/01/10/americas-first-clean-coal-plant-is-now-operational-and-another-is-on-the-way/ America’s first ‘clean coal’ plant is now operational — and another is on the way] Chris Mooney; Washington Post; 10 Jan 2017
 
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/01/10/americas-first-clean-coal-plant-is-now-operational-and-another-is-on-the-way/ America’s first ‘clean coal’ plant is now operational — and another is on the way] Chris Mooney; Washington Post; 10 Jan 2017
: The first large scale U.S. “clean coal” facility was declared operational Tuesday — by the large energy firm NRG Energy and JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration Corp. Their Petra Nova project, not far outside of Houston, captured carbon dioxide from the process of coal combustion for the first time in September, and has now piped 100,000 tons of it from the plant to the West Ranch oil field 80 miles away, where the carbon dioxide is used to force additional oil from the ground. The companies say that the plant can capture over 90 percent of the carbon dioxide released from the equivalent of a 240 megawatt, or million watt, coal unit, which translates into 5,000 tons of carbon dioxide per day or over 1 million tons per year. They’re calling it “the world’s largest post-combustion carbon capture system.”  
+
{{Quote|
 +
The first large scale U.S. “clean coal” facility was declared operational Tuesday — by the large energy firm NRG Energy and JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration Corp. Their Petra Nova project, not far outside of Houston, captured carbon dioxide from the process of coal combustion for the first time in September, and has now piped 100,000 tons of it from the plant to the West Ranch oil field 80 miles away, where the carbon dioxide is used to force additional oil from the ground. The companies say that the plant can capture over 90 percent of the carbon dioxide released from the equivalent of a 240 megawatt, or million watt, coal unit, which translates into 5,000 tons of carbon dioxide per day or over 1 million tons per year. They’re calling it “the world’s largest post-combustion carbon capture system.”  
  
: But there is another coal plant near completion in the United States that will also capture carbon dioxide — but using a very different approach. It’s the Kemper Plant, being operated by Mississippi Power,  a subsidiary of Southern Co., and expected to be operational Jan. 31. This plant has been designed to turn lignite, a type of coal, into a gas called syngas, stripping out some carbon dioxide in the process. The syngas is burned for electricity and the CO2 is then again shipped to an oil field to aid in additional oil recovery. Thus, at Petra Nova the capturing of carbon occurs after the coal has been burned — or “post-combustion” — whereas at Kemper, it happens beforehand.
+
But there is another coal plant near completion in the United States that will also capture carbon dioxide — but using a very different approach. It’s the Kemper Plant, being operated by Mississippi Power,  a subsidiary of Southern Co., and expected to be operational Jan. 31. This plant has been designed to turn lignite, a type of coal, into a gas called syngas, stripping out some carbon dioxide in the process. The syngas is burned for electricity and the CO2 is then again shipped to an oil field to aid in additional oil recovery. Thus, at Petra Nova the capturing of carbon occurs after the coal has been burned — or “post-combustion” — whereas at Kemper, it happens beforehand.
 +
}}
  
 
== UK ==
 
== UK ==
 +
 +
''See also'' [[H21 North of England]]
  
 
[http://www.whiteroseccs.co.uk/ White Rose]
 
[http://www.whiteroseccs.co.uk/ White Rose]
: The world’s first commercial scale, full chain, carbon capture and storage coal-fired power plant is being proposed by developer, Capture Power. The White Rose Carbon Capture and Storage Project (White Rose CCS Project), will comprise a state-of-the-art coal-fired power plant that is equipped with full carbon capture and storage technology. The project is intended to prove CCS technology at commercial scale and demonstrate it as a competitive form of low carbon power generation and as an important technology in tackling climate change. It will also play an important role in establishing a CO2 transportation and storage network in the Yorkshire and Humber area.
+
{{Quote|
 +
The world’s first commercial scale, full chain, carbon capture and storage coal-fired power plant is being proposed by developer, Capture Power. The White Rose Carbon Capture and Storage Project (White Rose CCS Project), will comprise a state-of-the-art coal-fired power plant that is equipped with full carbon capture and storage technology. The project is intended to prove CCS technology at commercial scale and demonstrate it as a competitive form of low carbon power generation and as an important technology in tackling climate change. It will also play an important role in establishing a CO2 transportation and storage network in the Yorkshire and Humber area.
  
: News: Government withdraws CCS Commercialisation Programme 25/11/2015
+
News: Government withdraws CCS Commercialisation Programme 25/11/2015
: Today, following the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement, HM Government confirmed that the £1 billion ring-fenced capital budget for the Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Competition is no longer available. Commenting on the news that the budget for the CCS competition is no longer available, Leigh Hackett, CEO of Capture Power, said: “We are surprised and very disappointed by the Government’s decision to cancel the £1bn CCS Commercialisation Programme more than three years into the competition. “It is too early to make any definitive decisions about the future of the White Rose CCS Project, however, it is difficult to imagine its continuation in the absence of crucial Government support.”
+
 
 +
Today, following the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement, HM Government confirmed that the £1 billion ring-fenced capital budget for the Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Competition is no longer available. Commenting on the news that the budget for the CCS competition is no longer available, Leigh Hackett, CEO of Capture Power, said: “We are surprised and very disappointed by the Government’s decision to cancel the £1bn CCS Commercialisation Programme more than three years into the competition. “It is too early to make any definitive decisions about the future of the White Rose CCS Project, however, it is difficult to imagine its continuation in the absence of crucial Government support.”
 +
}}
  
 
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/20/treasury-cut-carbon-capture-storage-cost-uk-30bn Treasury cut to carbon capture will cost UK £30bn, says watchdog] Damian Carrington; The Guardian; 20 Jul 2016
 
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/20/treasury-cut-carbon-capture-storage-cost-uk-30bn Treasury cut to carbon capture will cost UK £30bn, says watchdog] Damian Carrington; The Guardian; 20 Jul 2016
: The government’s cancellation of a pioneering £1bn competition to capture and store carbon emissions may have pushed up the bill for meeting the UK’s climate targets by £30bn, according to a report from the UK’s official spending watchdog. The National Audit Office (NAO) report, published on Wednesday, says the move has delayed by a decade the deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology in the UK, which takes emissions from power stations and industry and buries them so they do not contribute to global warming. The Treasury was warned by officials about the cost implications and that the last-minute cancellation could cause damage to the government’s reputation with industry and the international community. But the government, amid cuts to spending, decided the competition was aiming to deliver CCS before it was necessary and cost-efficient to do so. Both the UK government’s official advisers, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), and the UN’s climate panel have warned that the cost of tackling climate change will be doubled without CCS, as more expensive alternatives are needed instead. The UK is well placed to develop CCS, with access to depleted oil and gas fields in the North Sea to store CO2. But these now risk being shut down before CCS is developed, the NAO report said. The CCS competition axed in November was the second cancelled by government, with the first starting in 2007 and ending in 2011. The NAO said there is now “no viable way to achieve deep emissions reductions from the industrial sector in the near future”.
+
{{Quote|The government’s cancellation of a pioneering £1bn competition to capture and store carbon emissions may have pushed up the bill for meeting the UK’s climate targets by £30bn, according to a report from the UK’s official spending watchdog. The National Audit Office (NAO) report, published on Wednesday, says the move has delayed by a decade the deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology in the UK, which takes emissions from power stations and industry and buries them so they do not contribute to global warming. The Treasury was warned by officials about the cost implications and that the last-minute cancellation could cause damage to the government’s reputation with industry and the international community. But the government, amid cuts to spending, decided the competition was aiming to deliver CCS before it was necessary and cost-efficient to do so. Both the UK government’s official advisers, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), and the UN’s climate panel have warned that the cost of tackling climate change will be doubled without CCS, as more expensive alternatives are needed instead. The UK is well placed to develop CCS, with access to depleted oil and gas fields in the North Sea to store {{CO2}}. But these now risk being shut down before CCS is developed, the NAO report said. The CCS competition axed in November was the second cancelled by government, with the first starting in 2007 and ending in 2011. The NAO said there is now “no viable way to achieve deep emissions reductions from the industrial sector in the near future”.}}
  
 
=== CCSA report ===
 
=== CCSA report ===
Line 93: Line 188:
 
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/12/uk-must-move-now-on-carbon-capture-to-save-consumers-billions-says-report UK must move now on carbon capture to save consumers billions, says report] Damian Carrington; The Guardian; 12 Sep 2016
 
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/12/uk-must-move-now-on-carbon-capture-to-save-consumers-billions-says-report UK must move now on carbon capture to save consumers billions, says report] Damian Carrington; The Guardian; 12 Sep 2016
  
: The UK must immediately kickstart an industry to capture and bury carbon emissions in order to save consumers billions a year from the cost of meeting climate change targets, according to a high-level advisory group appointed by ministers. This requires the setting up of a new state-backed company to create the network needed to pipe the emissions into exhausted oil and gas fields under the North Sea, the group said.
+
{{Quote|
 +
The UK must immediately kickstart an industry to capture and bury carbon emissions in order to save consumers billions a year from the cost of meeting climate change targets, according to a high-level advisory group appointed by ministers. This requires the setting up of a new state-backed company to create the network needed to pipe the emissions into exhausted oil and gas fields under the North Sea, the group said.
  
: Failing to deliver CCS would hugely increase the cost of tackling climate change, according to the government’s official climate advisors, the National Audit Office and the UN’s climate science panel.
+
Failing to deliver CCS would hugely increase the cost of tackling climate change, according to the government’s official climate advisors, the National Audit Office and the UN’s climate science panel.
  
: CCS could also potentially enable hydrogen to solve the problem of cutting the emissions from the nation’s gas boilers and stoves, currently 25% of all emissions and a major factor in the UK’s imminent failure to meet clean energy targets.
+
CCS could also potentially enable hydrogen to solve the problem of cutting the emissions from the nation’s gas boilers and stoves, currently 25% of all emissions and a major factor in the UK’s imminent failure to meet clean energy targets.
  
: Natural gas can be converted to hydrogen and the CO2 produced buried using CCS. The hydrogen, which produces only water when burned, could then replace the gas in the national grid. This could also provide fuel for hydrogen-powered cars, as well as cutting the significant air pollution caused by gas boilers.
+
Natural gas can be converted to hydrogen and the {{CO2}} produced buried using CCS. The hydrogen, which produces only water when burned, could then replace the gas in the national grid. This could also provide fuel for hydrogen-powered cars, as well as cutting the significant air pollution caused by gas boilers.
 +
}}
  
 
[http://climateanswers.info/2016/10/carbon-capture-and-storage-time-for-the-uk-to-get-back-on-track/ Carbon Capture and Storage – time for the UK to get back on track] Stephen Tindale; Climate Answers; 20 Oct 2016
 
[http://climateanswers.info/2016/10/carbon-capture-and-storage-time-for-the-uk-to-get-back-on-track/ Carbon Capture and Storage – time for the UK to get back on track] Stephen Tindale; Climate Answers; 20 Oct 2016
: A new report entitled Lowest Cost Decarbonisation for the UK: The Critical Role of CCS, argues that the UK government should drastically rethink its CCS policy, and in effect u-turn again to get back on track with CCS. A cross-party group, headed by Lord Oxburgh, leading geologist and ex-chair of Shell, was invited by previous Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Amber Rudd to assess the CCS options in the UK. They conclude that CCS is not only clearly achievable, with all aspects of the supply chain demonstrated, but also potentially cheaper than nuclear or renewable options. The novel nature of the technology however, combined with an insufficient carbon price, means that government, rather than industry, must be the driving force behind the technology’s development.
+
{{Quote|A new report entitled Lowest Cost Decarbonisation for the UK: The Critical Role of CCS, argues that the UK government should drastically rethink its CCS policy, and in effect u-turn again to get back on track with CCS. A cross-party group, headed by Lord Oxburgh, leading geologist and ex-chair of Shell, was invited by previous Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Amber Rudd to assess the CCS options in the UK. They conclude that CCS is not only clearly achievable, with all aspects of the supply chain demonstrated, but also potentially cheaper than nuclear or renewable options. The novel nature of the technology however, combined with an insufficient carbon price, means that government, rather than industry, must be the driving force behind the technology’s development.}}
 
 
=== [[H21 Leeds City Gate]] * ===
 
  
 
== India ==
 
== India ==
  
 
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38391034 India's double first in climate battle] Roger Harrabin; BBC; 3 Jan 2017
 
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38391034 India's double first in climate battle] Roger Harrabin; BBC; 3 Jan 2017
: Two world-leading clean energy projects have opened in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. An industrial plant is capturing the CO2 emissions from a coal boiler and using the CO2 to make valuable chemicals. The industrial plant appears especially significant as it offers a breakthrough by capturing CO2 without subsidy. Built at a chemical plant in the port city of Tuticorin, it is projected to save 60,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions a year by incorporating them into the chemical recipe for soda ash - otherwise known as baking soda.
+
{{Quote|Two world-leading clean energy projects have opened in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. An industrial plant is capturing the {{CO2}} emissions from a coal boiler and using the {{CO2}} to make valuable chemicals. The industrial plant appears especially significant as it offers a breakthrough by capturing {{CO2}} without subsidy. Built at a chemical plant in the port city of Tuticorin, it is projected to save 60,000 tonnes of {{CO2}} emissions a year by incorporating them into the chemical recipe for soda ash - otherwise known as baking soda.
  
: The chemical used in stripping the CO2 from the flue gas was invented by two young Indian chemists. They failed to raise Indian finance to develop it, but their firm, Carbonclean Solutions, working with the Institute of Chemical Technology at Mumbai and Imperial College in London, got backing from the UK's entrepreneur support scheme. Their technique uses a form of salt to bond with CO2 molecules in the boiler chimney. The firm says it is more efficient than typical amine compounds used for the purpose. They say it also needs less energy, produces less alkaline waste and allows the use of a cheaper form of steel - all radically reducing the cost of the whole operation.
+
The chemical used in stripping the {{CO2}} from the flue gas was invented by two young Indian chemists. They failed to raise Indian finance to develop it, but their firm, Carbonclean Solutions, working with the Institute of Chemical Technology at Mumbai and Imperial College in London, got backing from the UK's entrepreneur support scheme. Their technique uses a form of salt to bond with {{CO2}} molecules in the boiler chimney. The firm says it is more efficient than typical amine compounds used for the purpose. They say it also needs less energy, produces less alkaline waste and allows the use of a cheaper form of steel - all radically reducing the cost of the whole operation.
 +
}}
  
 
== Canada - Saskpower / Saskatchewan Boundary Dam ==
 
== Canada - Saskpower / Saskatchewan Boundary Dam ==
  
 
[http://www.saskpower.com/our-power-future/carbon-capture-and-storage/boundary-dam-carbon-capture-project/ Boundary Dam Carbon Capture Project] Saskpower
 
[http://www.saskpower.com/our-power-future/carbon-capture-and-storage/boundary-dam-carbon-capture-project/ Boundary Dam Carbon Capture Project] Saskpower
 +
 +
[https://vimeo.com/129574575 SaskPower CCS Tour] Vimeo
  
 
[http://saskpowerccs.com/newsandmedia/media-gallery/ Media Gallery]
 
[http://saskpowerccs.com/newsandmedia/media-gallery/ Media Gallery]
Line 122: Line 220:
  
 
[http://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/pressreleases/2014/october/iea-hails-historic-launch-of-carbon-capture-and-storage-project.html IEA hails historic launch of carbon capture and storage project] IEA; 1 Oct 2014
 
[http://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/pressreleases/2014/october/iea-hails-historic-launch-of-carbon-capture-and-storage-project.html IEA hails historic launch of carbon capture and storage project] IEA; 1 Oct 2014
: The IEA believes CCS will have to play a central role in an ambitious, climate-friendly future energy scenario, accounting for one-sixth of required emissions reductions by 2050. IEA analysis has shown that without significant deployment of CCS, more than two-thirds of current proven fossil-fuel reserves cannot be commercialised before 2050 if the increase in global temperatures is to remain below 2 degrees Celsius. Several CCS projects are under construction or in advanced stages of planning. Early 2015 should see the start of operations for another large power-CCS project in Kemper County, Mississippi. Further projects are currently under construction elsewhere in the United States and Canada plus Saudi Arabia and Australia.
+
{{Quote|The IEA believes CCS will have to play a central role in an ambitious, climate-friendly future energy scenario, accounting for one-sixth of required emissions reductions by 2050. IEA analysis has shown that without significant deployment of CCS, more than two-thirds of current proven fossil-fuel reserves cannot be commercialised before 2050 if the increase in global temperatures is to remain below 2 degrees Celsius. Several CCS projects are under construction or in advanced stages of planning. Early 2015 should see the start of operations for another large power-CCS project in Kemper County, Mississippi. Further projects are currently under construction elsewhere in the United States and Canada plus Saudi Arabia and Australia.}}
  
 
[http://ieaghg.org/docs/General_Docs/Reports/2015-06.pdf Integrated Carbon Capture and Storage at Saskpower's Boundary Dam Power Station] IEAGHG; Aug 2015
 
[http://ieaghg.org/docs/General_Docs/Reports/2015-06.pdf Integrated Carbon Capture and Storage at Saskpower's Boundary Dam Power Station] IEAGHG; Aug 2015
: FOR SASKPOWER, owner and operator of the retrofitted Boundary Dam Power Unit 3 (BD3) that now incorporates carbon capture and storage (CCS), this event was the culmination of decades of work to continue operating coal-fired power-generating stations, while at the same time mitigating the climate change impact of associated air emissions. The CO2 captured at BD3 is geologically stored at two locations: in an oil reservoir approximately 1.4 kilometres deep at Cenovus’ CO2–EOR operation near Weyburn, Saskatchewan, and in a deep saline aquifer approximately 3.2 kilometres deep at the SaskPower Carbon Storage and Research Centre, located near the Boundary Dam Power Station. The latter geological storage site is the subject of the measurement, monitoring and verification (MMV) activities of the Aquistore Project that is managed by the Petroleum Technology Research Centre in Regina, Saskatchewan. SaskPower had forged ahead with design and construction of the BD3 ICCS retrofit well in advance of GHG Regulations being enacted in Canada, which came into effect on July 1, 2015. This was a strategic and environmentally-responsible decision to ensure continued use of lignite coal reserves in Saskatchewan that could last 250–500 years. The investment in the approx. 120 MW (net) BD3 power unit’s retrofit and carbon capture plant was approximately C$1.467 billion. This report explores the journey that SaskPower made from the 1980s to mid-2015 in pursuit of clean coal power generation. SaskPower pursued various technology options for carbon capture from oxyfuel combustion to amine solvent absorption that ultimately led to the decision to select the commercially unproven CANSOLV amine solvent carbon dioxide capture process. SaskPower then coupled that technology with Shell Cansolv’s proven sulphur dioxide capture process to simplify the capture plant operation and to further reduce emissions.
+
{{Quote|FOR SASKPOWER, owner and operator of the retrofitted Boundary Dam Power Unit 3 (BD3) that now incorporates carbon capture and storage (CCS), this event was the culmination of decades of work to continue operating coal-fired power-generating stations, while at the same time mitigating the climate change impact of associated air emissions. The {{CO2}} captured at BD3 is geologically stored at two locations: in an oil reservoir approximately 1.4 kilometres deep at Cenovus’ {{CO2}}–EOR operation near Weyburn, Saskatchewan, and in a deep saline aquifer approximately 3.2 kilometres deep at the SaskPower Carbon Storage and Research Centre, located near the Boundary Dam Power Station. The latter geological storage site is the subject of the measurement, monitoring and verification (MMV) activities of the Aquistore Project that is managed by the Petroleum Technology Research Centre in Regina, Saskatchewan. SaskPower had forged ahead with design and construction of the BD3 ICCS retrofit well in advance of GHG Regulations being enacted in Canada, which came into effect on July 1, 2015. This was a strategic and environmentally-responsible decision to ensure continued use of lignite coal reserves in Saskatchewan that could last 250–500 years. The investment in the approx. 120 MW (net) BD3 power unit’s retrofit and carbon capture plant was approximately C$1.467 billion. This report explores the journey that SaskPower made from the 1980s to mid-2015 in pursuit of clean coal power generation. SaskPower pursued various technology options for carbon capture from oxyfuel combustion to amine solvent absorption that ultimately led to the decision to select the commercially unproven CANSOLV amine solvent carbon dioxide capture process. SaskPower then coupled that technology with Shell Cansolv’s proven sulphur dioxide capture process to simplify the capture plant operation and to further reduce emissions.}}
  
 
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/01/canada-switches-on-worlds-first-carbon-capture-power-plant Canada switches on world's first carbon capture power plant] Suzanne Goldenberg; The Guardian; 1 Oct 2014
 
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/01/canada-switches-on-worlds-first-carbon-capture-power-plant Canada switches on world's first carbon capture power plant] Suzanne Goldenberg; The Guardian; 1 Oct 2014
: Boundary Dam held up as first commercial-scale CCS plant and proof that coal-burning is compatible with cutting emissions Canada has switched on the first large-scale coal-fired power plant fitted with a technology that proponents say enables the burning of fossil fuels without tipping the world into a climate catastrophe. The project, the first commercial-scale plant equipped with carbon capture and storage technology, was held up by the coal industry as a real life example that it is possible to go on burning the dirtiest of fossil fuels while avoiding dangerous global warming. Saskatchewan’s state-owned electricity provider is due to cut the ribbon on the $1.3 billion Canadian project on Thursday.
+
{{Quote|Boundary Dam held up as first commercial-scale CCS plant and proof that coal-burning is compatible with cutting emissions Canada has switched on the first large-scale coal-fired power plant fitted with a technology that proponents say enables the burning of fossil fuels without tipping the world into a climate catastrophe. The project, the first commercial-scale plant equipped with carbon capture and storage technology, was held up by the coal industry as a real life example that it is possible to go on burning the dirtiest of fossil fuels while avoiding dangerous global warming. Saskatchewan’s state-owned electricity provider is due to cut the ribbon on the $1.3 billion Canadian project on Thursday.}}
  
 
[http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/snc-lavalin-carbon-capture-project-saskpower-1.3291554 SNC-Lavalin-built carbon capture facility has 'serious design issues': SaskPower] Geoff Leo; CBC News; 27 Oct 2015
 
[http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/snc-lavalin-carbon-capture-project-saskpower-1.3291554 SNC-Lavalin-built carbon capture facility has 'serious design issues': SaskPower] Geoff Leo; CBC News; 27 Oct 2015
: An internal SaskPower briefing note obtained by the NDP suggests the much-celebrated Boundary Dam carbon capture project near Estevan, Sask., has "serious design issues". The note goes on to say the company contracted to engineer, procure, and build the capture facility, SNC-Lavalin "has neither the will or the ability to fix some of these fundamental flaws." The note, dated Sept. 30, 2014, said SaskPower has already paid 97 per cent of the value of the three subcontracts SaskPower had with SNC — $533 million of $549 million. It says at the time SaskPower was withholding $6.5 million in payments from SNC because the Crown corporation was having to pay to correct problems with SNC's work.
+
{{Quote|An internal SaskPower briefing note obtained by the NDP suggests the much-celebrated Boundary Dam carbon capture project near Estevan, Sask., has "serious design issues". The note goes on to say the company contracted to engineer, procure, and build the capture facility, SNC-Lavalin "has neither the will or the ability to fix some of these fundamental flaws." The note, dated Sept. 30, 2014, said SaskPower has already paid 97 per cent of the value of the three subcontracts SaskPower had with SNC — $533 million of $549 million. It says at the time SaskPower was withholding $6.5 million in payments from SNC because the Crown corporation was having to pay to correct problems with SNC's work.}}
  
 
[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/30/business/energy-environment/technology-to-make-clean-energy-from-coal-is-stumbling-in-practice.html?_r=2 Technology to Make Clean Energy From Coal Is Stumbling in Practice] IAN AUSTEN; N Y Times;  29 Mar 2016
 
[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/30/business/energy-environment/technology-to-make-clean-energy-from-coal-is-stumbling-in-practice.html?_r=2 Technology to Make Clean Energy From Coal Is Stumbling in Practice] IAN AUSTEN; N Y Times;  29 Mar 2016
: OTTAWA — An electrical plant on the Saskatchewan prairie was the great hope for industries that burn coal. In the first large-scale project of its kind, the plant was equipped with a technology that promised to pluck carbon out of the utility’s exhaust and bury it underground, transforming coal into a cleaner power source. In the months after opening, the utility and the provincial government declared the project an unqualified success. But the $1.1 billion project is now looking like a green dream. Known as SaskPower’s Boundary Dam 3, the project has been plagued by multiple shutdowns, has fallen way short of its emissions targets, and faces an unresolved problem with its core technology. The costs, too, have soared, requiring tens of millions of dollars in new equipment and repairs.
+
{{Quote|OTTAWA — An electrical plant on the Saskatchewan prairie was the great hope for industries that burn coal. In the first large-scale project of its kind, the plant was equipped with a technology that promised to pluck carbon out of the utility’s exhaust and bury it underground, transforming coal into a cleaner power source. In the months after opening, the utility and the provincial government declared the project an unqualified success. But the $1.1 billion project is now looking like a green dream. Known as SaskPower’s Boundary Dam 3, the project has been plagued by multiple shutdowns, has fallen way short of its emissions targets, and faces an unresolved problem with its core technology. The costs, too, have soared, requiring tens of millions of dollars in new equipment and repairs.}}
  
 
== Enhanced Oil Recovery ==
 
== Enhanced Oil Recovery ==
  
 
[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-oil-companies-save-the-world-from-global-warming/ Can Oil Companies Save the World from Global Warming?] David Biello; Scientific American; 19 Apr 2016
 
[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-oil-companies-save-the-world-from-global-warming/ Can Oil Companies Save the World from Global Warming?] David Biello; Scientific American; 19 Apr 2016
: Oil firms might pay to use CO2 emissions from power plants, but low petroleum prices could doom the effort
+
{{Quote|Oil firms might pay to use {{CO2}} emissions from power plants, but low petroleum prices could doom the effort}}
 +
 
 +
== Cement production ==
 +
 
 +
[https://energyinnovation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/The-Role-of-Cement-in-a-Carbon-Neutral-Future.pdf CEMENT’S ROLE IN A CARBON-NEUTRAL FUTURE]
 +
Jeffrey Rissman; Energy Innovation Policy &amp; Technology LLC; Nov 2018
 +
{{Quote|'''EXECUTIVE SUMMARY'''
 +
 
 +
The manufacture of cement, a constituent of concrete, is responsible for 5.6% of global carbon dioxide ({{CO2}}) emissions. 30-40% of these emissions are from thermal fuels (predominantly coal) used to heat the cement kiln, while 60-70% of the emissions are “process emissions” from the breakdown of limestone in a calcination reaction. (A small amount of emissions are also attributable to the generation of electricity used by cement makers.)
 +
 
 +
After its manufacture, cement naturally sequesters {{CO2}} from the atmosphere in a process called “carbonation.” Carbonation rates vary considerably with concrete properties, which differ by world region. Globally, roughly a third of cement’s process emissions are re-absorbed within the first two years, and over the course of decades, this share rises to 48%. Cement carbonation is relevant on a global scale but has been omitted from national emissions inventories and global estimates.
 +
 
 +
Various techniques exist to lower {{CO2}} emissions from the cement industry, including: energy efficiency technologies, adopting lower-emissions fuels to heat the kiln, substituting other materials for clinker (the constituent of cement responsible for cement’s process emissions), and improving concrete strength or longevity (thereby reducing demand for new concrete). Carbon capture technologies, including post-combustion and oxyfuel technologies, provide options to capture {{CO2}} emissions that cannot otherwise be avoided. Novel technologies by private firms CarbonCure and Solidia offer additional approaches to reducing emissions from the cement industry.
 +
 
 +
Modeling of three scenarios finds that capturing 80% of cement’s process emissions (and none of the thermal emissions) by 2050 is sufficient to make cement carbon-neutral, as natural carbonation offsets the remaining emissions. If the thermal fuel supply were to be fully decarbonized by 2050, a process emissions capture rate of 53% achieves carbon-neutral cement. Higher capture rates than these would provide net negative {{CO2}} emissions and the possibility that simply making concrete could reduce atmospheric {{CO2}} concentrations
 +
}}
 +
 
 +
[https://www.greenbiz.com/article/concrete-change-making-cement-carbon-negative Concrete change: Making cement carbon-negative] Jeffrey Rissman; Green Biz; 6 Dec 2018
 +
{{Quote|Cement is one of the world’s most-used building materials, with production reaching 4.3 billion tons/year in 2014 and growing 5 percent to 6 percent annually. Today, it is responsible for 5.6 percent of global carbon dioxide ({{CO2}}) emissions and a major contributor to climate change — if the cement industry were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest emitter. To stay below 2 degrees Celsius of global warming, cement’s carbon intensity must be reduced to near-zero as soon as technically feasible.
 +
 
 +
Fortunately, the right policies and technologies can make cement manufacturing a net climate benefit. During its lifetime and after demolition, cement naturally captures a significant fraction of the {{CO2}} emitted during its manufacture. When this effect is combined with carbon capture and storage (CCS), energy efficiency technologies and biofuels or electrification, cement can remove more {{CO2}} than it adds to the atmosphere.
 +
 
 +
In the new book "Designing Climate Solutions: A Policy Guide to Low-Carbon Energy," my co-authors and I identify a suite of policies such as carbon pricing, industry efficiency or emissions standards, and government research and development (R&D) support to help ensure the necessary technologies exist and incentivize their use.
 +
 
 +
Our research shows (PDF) that depending on the extent thermal fuel supply is decarbonized, a {{CO2}} capture rate between 53 percent and 80 percent will make cement carbon-neutral, and higher CCS capture rates achieve net carbon-negative cement. This offers the prospect of a world where simply constructing buildings and infrastructure reduces atmospheric {{CO2}} concentrations and contributes to the fight against climate change.
 +
}}
 +
 
 +
[https://www.sustainableplastics.com/news/austrian-companies-collaborate-industrial-scale-co2-capture-and-utilisation-project Austrian companies collaborate on industrial-scale CO2 capture and utilisation project] Karen Laird; Sustainable Plastics; 25 June 2020
 +
: Austrian CCU project to capture {{CO2}} from cement production and make hydrocarbon fuels using Hydrogen from renewable electricity.
 +
{{Quote|
 +
Lafarge Zementwerke, a member of LafargeHolcim Group, OMV, utility company Verbund and Borealis have launched plans for a joint project aimed at advancing the transformation towards a Zero CO2 economy in Europe.
  
== technology ==
+
The companies have co-signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) under which they agree to collaborate across industry sectors in a project called ‘Carbon2ProductAustria’  - or C2PAT, for short.
 +
The idea is to establish  CO2 as a valuable raw material through the creation of a cross-sectorial value chain. Green hydrogen will be used to recycle the captured greenhouse gas.
 +
 
 +
The project involves planning and constructing in three phases a full-scale plant by 2030 to capture CO2 emitted during the cement production process, for utilization in the production of synthetic fuels, plastics or other chemicals. The facility would eventually capture almost 100% of the annually emitted 700,000 tons of CO2 at Lafarge’s cement plant in Mannersdorf, Austria.
 +
 +
Phase 1 consists of the evaluation and development by the partners of a joint strategy for the project development, business modelling and process engineering. Based on the results of phase 1, phase 2 would see a cluster of industrial pilot plants in the eastern part of Austria being  technically developed and realised until 2023. In Phase 3, the operations would be fully scaled up for the capture  and use of 700,000 tons of CO2.
 +
 
 +
"Ultimately, CO2-neutral cement production can only be possible with the implementation of breakthrough technologies, like Carbon Capture, which is why we have great expectations for the C2PAT project", said Lafarge CEO José Antonio Primo.
 +
 
 +
Fueled by green hydrogen  - from renewable energies- produced by Verbund, the captured CO2 will be transformed by OMV into renewable based hydrocarbons.
 +
 
 +
“Green hydrogen is produced when water is electrolyzed using electricity from renewable sources. For the Carbon2ProductAustria-Project we will use green electricity from our renewable generation portfolio,” explained Michael Strugl, Deputy CEO of Verbund.
 +
 
 +
The hydrocarbons produced by OMV will be used to produce renewably- based fuels or be utilized by Borealis as a feedstock for the production of renewably-based, value-add plastics. If these plastics are subsequently recycled at the end of life,  a nearly closed CO2 loop is created. As OMV chairman of the executive board and CEO  noted, CO2 is not just a ‘greenhouse gas that we have to reduce. It is also a valuable raw material from which we can produce synthetic fuels and feedstock for the chemical industry’.
 +
}}
 +
 
 +
== Technology ==
 +
 
 +
=== Membrane ===
 +
[http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2016/03/17/carbon-capture-membrane/ New Carbon Capture Membrane Boasts CO2 Highways] Dan Krotz; Berkeley Lab press release; 17 Mar 2016
 +
{{Quote|A new, highly permeable carbon capture membrane developed by scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) could lead to more efficient ways of separating carbon dioxide from power plant exhaust, preventing the greenhouse gas from entering the atmosphere and contributing to climate change. The researchers focused on a hybrid membrane that is part polymer and part metal-organic framework, which is a porous three-dimensional crystal with a large internal surface area that can absorb enormous quantities of molecules.}}
 +
 
 +
=== Carbonate fuel cell ===
 +
 
 +
[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601402/exxon-has-a-clever-way-to-capture-carbon-if-it-works/ Exxon Has a Clever Way to Capture Carbon—If It Works] Richard Martin; MIT Technology Review; 6 May 2016
 +
{{Quote|Sticking a fuel cell in a smokestack could dramatically reduce emissions.}}
 +
 
 +
=== Non-thermal plasma field ===
 +
 
 +
[http://midwestenergynews.com/2016/06/16/researchers-150-year-old-technology-could-provide-clean-coal-solution/ Researchers: 150-year-old technology could provide ‘clean’ coal solution] Kari Lydersen; MidWest Energy News; 16 Jun 2016
 +
{{Quote|As coal advocates seek to keep their industry viable amid tighter restrictions on carbon emissions, an Illinois researcher says a new spin on a 150-year-old technology might hold the solution. Michael Garvin, an energy expert at the Illinois Institute of Technology, says a technology known as a non-thermal plasma field has shown promise after recent tests – reducing carbon emissions by more than 90 percent – at the Scrubgrass Power Plant in Pennsylvania, which burns dirty “waste coal” to make electricity. The company Carbon Conversion International (CCI) developed technology to pass air emissions through the plasma field to extract carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide. Another byproduct – oxygen – can be fed right back into the combustion chamber. Meanwhile the carbon is concentrated into its nearly elemental form, known as “carbon black,” and sold on the market where it is used for tires, rubber, plastics, printing inks and other applications.}}
 +
 
 +
=== Allam cycle ===
 +
 
 +
The Allam cycle uses oxy-combustion with a turbine driven by supercritical CO2 rather than steam.
 +
 
 +
[http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/goodbye-smokestacks-startup-invents-zero-emission-fossil-fuel-power Goodbye smokestacks: Startup invents zero-emission fossil fuel power] Robert F. Service; Science Mag; 24 May 2017
 +
{{Quote|NET Power, the startup backing the new plant, says it expects to produce emission-free power at about $0.06 per kilowatt-hour. That's about the same cost as power from a state-of-the-art natural gas-fired plant—and cheaper than most renewable energy. The key to its efficiency is a new thermodynamic cycle that swaps {{CO2}} for the steam that drives turbines in conventional plants. Invented by an unlikely trio—a retired British engineer and a pair of technology geeks who had tired of their day jobs—the scheme may soon get a bigger test. If the prototype lives up to hopes, NET Power says, it will forge ahead with a full-scale, 300-megawatt power plant—enough to power more than 200,000 homes—which could open in 2021 at a cost of about $300 million.}}
 +
 
 +
[http://www.sustainablebrands.com/news_and_views/product_service_design_innovation/sustainable_brands/new_turbine_technology_makes_zer New Turbine Technology Makes Zero-Emissions Fossil Fuel Power Plants a Reality] Sustainable Brands; 8 Dec 2017
 +
{{Quote|North Carolina startup NET Power has found a way to power the transition to a {{CO2}}-free future without parting ways with fossil fuels with its pioneering turbine technology.
 +
 
 +
Piloted at its natural gas plant in Houston, Texas, the technology is powered by carbon dioxide in lieu of the steam used in conventional plants, which is turned into mechanical energy and later electricity. The system draws on the Allam cycle, a process for converting fossil fuels using a single turbine into mechanical power while capturing the resulting water and {{CO2}}. This is made possible by using pure oxygen to burn the fuel. The {{CO2}} is separated out in a heat exchanger, then compressed mechanically and a small amount is captured at high pressure, ready for pipeline transmission. The rest of the carbon is reheated and recycled into the combustion unit. The Allam cycle was developed by Rodney Allam in collaboration with 8 Rivers, an investment firm focused on innovative technology.
 +
 
 +
In addition to eliminating emissions such as {{CO2}}, particulate matter, mercury, SO{{sub|x}} and NO{{sub|x}}, the technology can also eliminate water consumption because it doesn’t require steam for power production.
 +
 
 +
Due to the high-efficiency design of the turbines, which are one-tenth the size of traditional turbines, NET Power says it will be able to deliver emission-free power at about $0.06 per kilowatt-hour — a major milestone for carbon capture. Carbon capture technologies have traditionally been energy intensive and those costs, using up to 30 percent of a power plant’s energy and as a result driving up the cost of electricity.
 +
 
 +
Once final testing is complete on its prototype, NET Power will begin operating its plant at full capacity in 2018. The plant is expected to produce enough electricity to power 40,000 homes. If successful, the startup intends to create a 300-megawatt power plant in 2021, which would power more than 200,000 homes. Additionally, the company plans to license the technology in an effort to drive an industry-wide shift.
 +
 
 +
“This is the biggest thing in carbon capture,” Howard Herzog, a chemical engineer and carbon capture expert at MIT, told Science. “It’s very sound paper. We’ll see if it works in reality. There are only a million things that can go wrong.”
 +
}}
 +
 
 +
=== Carbon powder adsorption ===
 +
 
 +
[https://uwaterloo.ca/news/news/new-powder-could-help-cut-co2-emissions New powder could help cut {{CO2}} emissions] University of Waterloo news; 18 Dec 2018
 +
{{Quote|
 +
Scientists at the University of Waterloo have created a powder that could capture carbon dioxide ({{CO2}}) from factories and power plants.
 +
 
 +
The advanced carbon powder, developed using a novel process in the lab of Zhongwei Chen, a chemical engineering professor at Waterloo, could filter and remove {{CO2}} from emissions at facilities powered by fossil fuels before it is released into the atmosphere with twice the efficiency of conventional materials.
 +
 
 +
{{CO2}} molecules stick to the surface of carbon when they come in contact with it, a process known as adsorption. Since it is abundant, inexpensive and environmentally friendly, that makes carbon an excellent material to capture {{CO2}}, a greenhouse gas that is the primary contributor to global warming.
 +
 +
The researchers, who collaborated with colleagues at several universities in China, set out to improve adsorption performance by manipulating the size and concentration of pores in carbon materials.
 +
 +
The technique they developed uses heat and salt to extract a black carbon powder from plant matter. Carbon spheres that make up the powder have many, many pores and the vast majority of them are less than one-millionth of a metre in diameter.
 +
 +
Once saturated with carbon dioxide at large point sources such as fossil fuel power plants, the powder would be transported to storage sites and buried in underground geological formations to prevent {{CO2}} release into the atmosphere.
 +
}}
 +
 
 +
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328677883_In-situ_ion-activated_carbon_nanospheres_with_tunable_ultramicroporosity_for_superior_CO2_capture In-situ ion-activated carbon nanospheres with tunable ultramicroporosity for superior {{CO2}} capture] Zhen Zhang et al; Researchgate; Nov 2018
 +
{{Quote|
 +
Ultramicroporous carbon materials play a critical role in {{CO2}} capture and separation, however facile approaches to design ultramicroporous carbon with controllable amount, ratio and size of pores are still challenging. Herein, a novel strategy to design carbon nanospheres with abundant, uniform, and tunable ultramicroporosity was developed based on an in-situ ionic activation methodology. The adjustable ion-exchange capacity derived from oxidative functionalization was found capable of substantially governing the ionic activation and precisely regulating the ultramicroporosity in the resultant product. An ultrahigh ultramicropore content of 95.5% was achieved for the optimally- designed carbon nanospheres, which demonstrated excellent {{CO2}} capture performances with extremely high capacities of 1.58 mmol g-1 at typical flue gas conditions and 4.30 mmol g-1 at 25 °C and ambient pressure. Beyond that, the {{CO2}} adsorption mechanism in ultramicropore was also investigated through molecular dynamics simulation to guide the pore size optimization. This work provides a novel and facile guideline to engineer carbon materials with abundant and tunable ultramicroporosity towards superior {{CO2}} capture performance, which also delivers great potential in extensive applications such as water purification, catalysis, and energy storage.}}
 +
 
 +
=== Electrical - electroswing adsorber ===
 +
[https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/this-new-battery-aims-to-spark-a-carbon-capture-revolution This new ‘battery’ aims to spark a carbon capture revolution] Nsikan Akpan; PBS; 15 Nov 2019
 +
{{Quote|
 +
Chemical engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a new device that can remove carbon dioxide from the air at any concentration. Published in October in the journal Energy & Environmental Science, the project is the latest bid to directly capture {{CO2}} emissions and keep them from accelerating and worsening future climate disasters.
 +
 
 +
Think of the invention as a quasi-battery, in terms of its shape, its construction and how it works to collect carbon dioxide. You pump electricity into the battery, and while the device stores this charge, a chemical reaction occurs that absorbs {{CO2}} from the surrounding atmosphere — a process known as direct air capture. The {{CO2}} can be extracted by discharging the battery, releasing the gas, so the {{CO2}} then can be pumped into the ground. The researchers describe this back-and-forth as electroswing adsorption.
 +
}}
  
 
=== BECCS ===
 
=== BECCS ===
[https://www.wired.com/story/the-dirty-secret-of-the-worlds-plan-to-avert-climate-disaster/ The Dirty Secret of the World’s Plan to Avert Climate Disaster] ABBY RABINOWITZ, AMANDA SIMSON; Wired; 10 Dec 2017
 
: IN 2014 HENRIK Karlsson, a Swedish entrepreneur whose startup was failing, was lying in bed with a bankruptcy notice when the BBC called. The reporter had a scoop: On the eve of releasing a major report, the United Nation’s climate change panel appeared to be touting an untried technology as key to keeping planetary temperatures at safe levels. The technology went by the inelegant acronym BECCS, and Karlsson was apparently the only BECCS expert the reporter could find.
 
  
: Karlsson was amazed. The bankruptcy notice was for his BECCS startup, which he’d founded seven years earlier after an idea came to him while watching a late-night television show in Gothenburg, Sweden. The show explored the benefits of capturing carbon dioxide before it was emitted from power plants. It’s the technology behind the much-touted notion of “clean coal,” a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow down climate change.
+
'''BECCS deployment: a reality check'''
 +
by MATHILDE FAJARDY, DR. ALEXANDRE KÖBERLE, DR. NIALL MAC DOWELL, DR. ANDREA FANTUZZI
 +
of Imperial College, Grantham Institute
 +
in January 2019
 +
[https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/grantham-institute/public/publications/briefing-papers/BECCS-deployment---a-reality-check.pdf [pdf]]
 +
{{Quote|Headlines
 +
* Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is presented as a pivotal technology in most pathways for limiting global warming to 1.5 or 2°C. However, it is doubtful that BECCS can fulfil this role alone.
 +
* BECCS is not a single technology. Understanding the value and challenges associated with each BECCS technology is complex but vital.
 +
* Depending on the conditions of its deployment, BECCS may be beneficial but it can also be detrimental to climate change mitigation, due to its lifecycle {{CO2}} balance, energy balance and resource use.
 +
* It is challenging to ensure that BECCS delivers timely and sustainable net carbon removal, while also generating energy at an appropriate scale.
 +
* Considering these uncertainties and the potential impact on resources, biodiversity and soil health, the scale of BECCS deployment should be limited only to circumstances where it is proven to be beneficial.
 +
* Good governance and financial incentives are required to stimulate high-quality BECCS at this limited scale.
 +
* Policy makers should be sceptical about a future that is uniquely or heavily reliant on BECCS, and instead prepare for and implement alternative mitigation options as soon as possible.
 +
}}
 +
 
 +
'''The Dirty Secret of the World’s Plan to Avert Climate Disaster'''
 +
by ABBY RABINOWITZ, AMANDA SIMSON
 +
in Wired
 +
on 10 Dec 2017
 +
[https://www.wired.com/story/the-dirty-secret-of-the-worlds-plan-to-avert-climate-disaster/ [article]]
 +
{{Quote|
 +
IN 2014 HENRIK Karlsson, a Swedish entrepreneur whose startup was failing, was lying in bed with a bankruptcy notice when the BBC called. The reporter had a scoop: On the eve of releasing a major report, the United Nation’s climate change panel appeared to be touting an untried technology as key to keeping planetary temperatures at safe levels. The technology went by the inelegant acronym BECCS, and Karlsson was apparently the only BECCS expert the reporter could find.
 +
 
 +
Karlsson was amazed. The bankruptcy notice was for his BECCS startup, which he’d founded seven years earlier after an idea came to him while watching a late-night television show in Gothenburg, Sweden. The show explored the benefits of capturing carbon dioxide before it was emitted from power plants. It’s the technology behind the much-touted notion of “clean coal,” a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow down climate change.
 +
 
 +
Karlsson, then a 27-year-old studying to be an operatic tenor, was no climate scientist or engineer. Still, the TV show got him thinking: During photosynthesis plants naturally suck carbon dioxide from the air, storing it in their leaves, branches, seeds, roots, and trunks. So what if you grew crops and then burned those crops for electricity, being sure to capture all of the carbon dioxide emitted? You’d then store all that dangerous CO2 underground. Such a power plant wouldn’t just be emitting less greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, it would effectively be sucking {{CO2}} from the air. Karlsson was enraptured with the idea. He was going to help avert a global disaster.
 +
 
 +
The next morning, he ran to the library, where he read a 2001 Science paper by Austrian modeler Michael Obersteiner theorizing the same idea, which was later dubbed “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage”—BECCS. Karlsson was sold. He launched his BECCS startup in 2007, riding the wave of optimism generated by Al Gore’s first climate change movie. Karlsson’s company even became a finalist in Richard Branson’s Virgin Earth Challenge, which was offering $25 million for a scalable solution for removing greenhouse gases. But by 2014, Karlsson’s startup was a failure. He took the BBC’s call as a sign that he shouldn’t give up.
 +
 
 +
In the report, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—universally known by yet another acronym, IPCC—presented results from hundreds of computer-model-generated scenarios in which the planet’s temperature rises less than 2 degrees Celsius (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, the limit eventually set by the Paris Climate Agreement.
 +
 
 +
The 2°C goal was a theoretical limit for how much warming humans could accept. For leading climatologist James Hansen, even the 2°C limit is unsafe. And without emissions cuts, global temperatures are projected to rise by 4°C by the end of the century. Many scientists are reluctant to make predictions, but the apocalyptic litany of what a 4°C world could hold includes widespread drought, famine, climate refugees by the millions, civilization-threatening warfare, and a sea level rise that would permanently drown much of New York, Miami, Mumbai, Shanghai, and other coastal cities.
 +
 
 +
But here’s where things get weird. The UN report envisions 116 scenarios in which global temperatures are prevented from rising more than 2°C. In 101 of them, that goal is accomplished by sucking massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a concept called “negative emissions”—chiefly via BECCS. And in these scenarios to prevent planetary disaster, this would need to happen by midcentury, or even as soon as 2020. Like a pharmaceutical warning label, one footnote warned that such “methods may carry side effects and long-term consequences on a global scale.”
  
: Karlsson, then a 27-year-old studying to be an operatic tenor, was no climate scientist or engineer. Still, the TV show got him thinking: During photosynthesis plants naturally suck carbon dioxide from the air, storing it in their leaves, branches, seeds, roots, and trunks. So what if you grew crops and then burned those crops for electricity, being sure to capture all of the carbon dioxide emitted? You’d then store all that dangerous CO2 underground. Such a power plant wouldn’t just be emitting less greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, it would effectively be sucking CO2 from the air. Karlsson was enraptured with the idea. He was going to help avert a global disaster.
+
Indeed, following the scenarios’ assumptions, just growing the crops needed to fuel those BECCS plants would require a landmass one to two times the size of India, climate researchers Kevin Anderson and Glen Peters wrote. The energy BECCS was supposed to supply is on par with all of the coal-fired power plants in the world. In other words, the models were calling for an energy revolution—one that was somehow supposed to occur well within millennials’ lifetimes.
  
: The next morning, he ran to the library, where he read a 2001 Science paper by Austrian modeler Michael Obersteiner theorizing the same idea, which was later dubbed “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage”—BECCS. Karlsson was sold. He launched his BECCS startup in 2007, riding the wave of optimism generated by Al Gore’s first climate change movie. Karlsson’s company even became a finalist in Richard Branson’s Virgin Earth Challenge, which was offering $25 million for a scalable solution for removing greenhouse gases. But by 2014, Karlsson’s startup was a failure. He took the BBC’s call as a sign that he shouldn’t give up.
+
Today that vast future sector of the economy amounts to one working project in the world: a repurposed corn ethanol plant in Decatur, Illinois. Which raises a question: Has the world come to rely on an imaginary technology to save it?
 +
}}
  
: In the report, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—universally known by yet another acronym, IPCC—presented results from hundreds of computer-model-generated scenarios in which the planet’s temperature rises less than 2 degrees Celsius (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, the limit eventually set by the Paris Climate Agreement.
+
'''Vast bioenergy plantations could stave off climate change—and radically reshape the planet'''
 +
by Julia Rosen
 +
in Science magazine
 +
on 15 Feb 2018
 +
[http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/02/vast-bioenergy-plantations-could-stave-climate-change-and-radically-reshape-planet [article]]
 +
{{Quote|
 +
On a sunny day this past October, three dozen people file into a modest, mint-green classroom at Montana State University (MSU) in Bozeman to glimpse a vision of the future. Some are scientists, but most are people with some connection to the land: extension agents who work with farmers, and environmentalists representing organizations such as The Nature Conservancy. They all know that climate change will reshape the region in the coming decades, but that's not what they've come to discuss. They are here to talk about the equally profound impacts of trying to stop it.
  
: The 2°C goal was a theoretical limit for how much warming humans could accept. For leading climatologist James Hansen, even the 2°C limit is unsafe. And without emissions cuts, global temperatures are projected to rise by 4°C by the end of the century. Many scientists are reluctant to make predictions, but the apocalyptic litany of what a 4°C world could hold includes widespread drought, famine, climate refugees by the millions, civilization-threatening warfare, and a sea level rise that would permanently drown much of New York, Miami, Mumbai, Shanghai, and other coastal cities.
+
Paul Stoy, an ecologist at MSU, paces in front of whiteboards in a powder blue shirt and jeans as he describes how a landscape already dominated by agriculture could be transformed yet again by a different green revolution: vast plantations of crops, sown to sop up carbon dioxide ({{CO2}}) from the sky. "We have this new energy economy that's necessary to avoid dangerous climate change, but how is that going to look on the ground?" he asks.
  
: But here’s where things get weird. The UN report envisions 116 scenarios in which global temperatures are prevented from rising more than 2°C. In 101 of them, that goal is accomplished by sucking massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a concept called “negative emissions”—chiefly via BECCS. And in these scenarios to prevent planetary disaster, this would need to happen by midcentury, or even as soon as 2020. Like a pharmaceutical warning label, one footnote warned that such “methods may carry side effects and long-term consequences on a global scale.
+
In 2015, the Paris climate agreement established a goal of limiting global warming to "well below" 2°C. In the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, researchers surveyed possible road maps for reaching that goal and found something unsettling. In most model scenarios, simply cutting emissions isn't enough. To limit warming, humanity also needs negative emissions technologies (NETs) that, by the end of the century, would remove more {{CO2}} from the atmosphere than humans emit. The technologies would buy time for society to rein in carbon emissions, says Naomi Vaughan, a climate change scientist at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, U.K. "They allow you to emit more {{CO2}} and take it back at a later date."
  
: Indeed, following the scenarios’ assumptions, just growing the crops needed to fuel those BECCS plants would require a landmass one to two times the size of India, climate researchers Kevin Anderson and Glen Peters wrote. The energy BECCS was supposed to supply is on par with all of the coal-fired power plants in the world. In other words, the models were calling for an energy revolution—one that was somehow supposed to occur well within millennials’ lifetimes.
+
Whether that's doable is another question. Some NETs amount to giant air-purifying machines, and many remain more fiction than fact. Few operate at commercial scales today, and some researchers fear they offer policymakers a dangerous excuse to drag their feet on climate action in the hopes that future inventions will clean up the mess. "In many ways, we're saying we expect a bit of magic to occur," says Chris Field, a climate scientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who instead favors drastic emissions reductions. Others say we no longer have a choice—that we have dallied too long to meet the Paris targets solely by tightening our belts. "We probably need aggressive and immediate mitigation, plus some negative emissions," says Pete Smith, a soil scientist and bioenergy expert at the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom.
  
: Today that vast future sector of the economy amounts to one working project in the world: a repurposed corn ethanol plant in Decatur, Illinois. Which raises a question: Has the world come to rely on an imaginary technology to save it?
+
One particular technology has quietly risen to prominence—thanks to global models—and it is the one on tap in Bozeman. The idea is to cultivate fast-growing grasses and trees to suck {{CO2}} out of the atmosphere and then burn them at power plants to generate energy. But instead of being released back into the atmosphere in the exhaust, the crops' carbon would be captured and pumped underground. The technique is known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or—among climate wonks—simply as BECCS.
 +
}}
  
 
==== Illinois ethanol plant ====
 
==== Illinois ethanol plant ====
  
[http://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-negative-emissions-tested-worlds-first-major-beccs-facility Negative emissions tested at world’s first major BECCS facility] Carbon Brief; 31 May 2016
+
'''Negative emissions tested at world’s first major BECCS facility'''
: Decatur, Illinois, is a city built on corn. At the centre of its economy are two giant agribusinesses, Tate & Lyle and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), which together grind thousands of bushels a day into syrups, sweeteners, ethanol fuel and other useful products. Thanks to the second of these companies, Decatur is also a city that is built on CO2 — literally. For the past nine years, ADM has been part of an ongoing experiment to capture the emissions from its ethanol plant and trap it in the layer of sandstone that lies beneath the Illinois corn belt.
+
by Carbon Brief
 +
on 31 May 2016
 +
[http://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-negative-emissions-tested-worlds-first-major-beccs-facility [article]]
 +
{{Quote| Decatur, Illinois, is a city built on corn. At the centre of its economy are two giant agribusinesses, Tate & Lyle and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), which together grind thousands of bushels a day into syrups, sweeteners, ethanol fuel and other useful products. Thanks to the second of these companies, Decatur is also a city that is built on CO2 — literally. For the past nine years, ADM has been part of an ongoing experiment to capture the emissions from its ethanol plant and trap it in the layer of sandstone that lies beneath the Illinois corn belt.}}
  
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/04/10/the-quest-to-capture-and-store-carbon-and-slow-climate-change-just-reached-a-new-milestone/ The quest to capture and store carbon – and slow climate change — just reached a new milestone] Chris Mooney; Washington Post; 10 April 2017
+
'''The quest to capture and store carbon – and slow climate change — just reached a new milestone'''
: A new large-scale technology has launched in Decatur, Illinois that, by combining together corn-based fuels with the burial of carbon dioxide deep underground, could potentially result in the active removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
+
by Chris Mooney
 +
in Washington Post
 +
on 10 April 2017
 +
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/04/10/the-quest-to-capture-and-store-carbon-and-slow-climate-change-just-reached-a-new-milestone/ [article]]
 +
{{Quote|A new large-scale technology has launched in Decatur, Illinois that, by combining together corn-based fuels with the burial of carbon dioxide deep underground, could potentially result in the active removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.}}
  
 
==== Limitations: planetary boundaries ====
 
==== Limitations: planetary boundaries ====
  
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-017-0064-y.epdf?referrer_access_token=FyHZ6WYmSKjlBrKhCtNeHdRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0OkhNv1HkUO82XZFYuXtY4ghzZ93ua-L9-FMDelOMcCTnQQIDQ8i5DSWVrqPPYEtdYoAWS1ODx6Qt54NV6SFX5W7N2bHUXgqlRxVW_UYKkdyg1kTAf3DIW8IU3gRdmWlgJFadYhnGLdAWFCzefSt47Bk67WNjI90Z24KPEhRya54qyLrr_vI0CIiOeG0bZOp8YlwoMQgUJVL5WWPXZWxFH12jTn2gSgkhGIUu60_T-p3AyA0KrmOaATzDR-a4SVNiCBecjHhfVMnBza6SzHrTzoNTphuOn-_RMiD3EBfEcCKg%3D%3D&tracking_referrer=www.washingtonpost.com Biomass-based negative emissions difficult to reconcile with planetary boundaries] Vera Heck, Dieter Gerten, Wolfgang Lucht, Alexander Popp; Nature Climate Change;
+
'''Biomass-based negative emissions difficult to reconcile with planetary boundaries'''
: Under the Paris Agreement, 195 nations have committed to holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre industrial levels and to strive to limit the increase to 1.5 °C (ref. 1). It is noted that this requires "a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of the century"1. This either calls for zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions or a balance between positive and negative emis-sions (NE)2,3. Roadmaps and socio-economic scenarios com-patible with a 2 °C or 1.5 °C goal depend upon NE via bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) to balance remain-ing GHG emissions4–7. However, large-scale deployment of BECCS would imply significant impacts on many Earth system components besides atmospheric CO2 concentrations8,9. Here we explore the feasibility of NE via BECCS from dedicated plantations and potential trade-offs with planetary boundar-ies (PBs)10,11 for multiple socio-economic pathways. We show that while large-scale BECCS is intended to lower the pressure on the PB for climate change, it would most likely steer the Earth system closer to the PB for freshwater use and lead to further transgression of the PBs for land-system change, bio-sphere integrity and biogeochemical flows.
+
by Vera Heck, Dieter Gerten, Wolfgang Lucht, Alexander Popp
 +
in Nature Climate Change
 +
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-017-0064-y.epdf?referrer_access_token=FyHZ6WYmSKjlBrKhCtNeHdRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0OkhNv1HkUO82XZFYuXtY4ghzZ93ua-L9-FMDelOMcCTnQQIDQ8i5DSWVrqPPYEtdYoAWS1ODx6Qt54NV6SFX5W7N2bHUXgqlRxVW_UYKkdyg1kTAf3DIW8IU3gRdmWlgJFadYhnGLdAWFCzefSt47Bk67WNjI90Z24KPEhRya54qyLrr_vI0CIiOeG0bZOp8YlwoMQgUJVL5WWPXZWxFH12jTn2gSgkhGIUu60_T-p3AyA0KrmOaATzDR-a4SVNiCBecjHhfVMnBza6SzHrTzoNTphuOn-_RMiD3EBfEcCKg%3D%3D&tracking_referrer=www.washingtonpost.com [paper]]
 +
{{Quote|Under the Paris Agreement, 195 nations have committed to holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre industrial levels and to strive to limit the increase to 1.5 °C (ref. 1). It is noted that this requires "a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of the century"1. This either calls for zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions or a balance between positive and negative emissions (NE)2,3. Roadmaps and socio-economic scenarios compatible with a 2 °C or 1.5 °C goal depend upon NE via bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) to balance remaining GHG emissions4–7. However, large-scale deployment of BECCS would imply significant impacts on many Earth system components besides atmospheric CO2 concentrations8,9. Here we explore the feasibility of NE via BECCS from dedicated plantations and potential trade-offs with planetary boundaries (PBs)10,11 for multiple socio-economic pathways. We show that while large-scale BECCS is intended to lower the pressure on the PB for climate change, it would most likely steer the Earth system closer to the PB for freshwater use and lead to further transgression of the PBs for land-system change, biosphere integrity and biogeochemical flows.}}
  
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/01/22/a-technology-many-hoped-would-fight-climate-change-would-cause-even-bigger-environmental-problems-scientists-say/ This big new idea for stopping climate change would cause even bigger problems, scientists say] Chris Mooney; Washington Post; 22 Jan 2018
+
'''This big new idea for stopping climate change would cause even bigger problems, scientists say'''
: scientists argue that deploying BECCS technology on the scale needed to address the problem would use up massive amounts of water, fertilizer and land. That would probably lead to large environmental problems or even destabilize key planetary systems, wrote Vera Heck of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and three colleagues.
+
by Chris Mooney
 +
in Washington Post
 +
on 22 Jan 2018
 +
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/01/22/a-technology-many-hoped-would-fight-climate-change-would-cause-even-bigger-environmental-problems-scientists-say/ [article]]
 +
{{Quote| scientists argue that deploying BECCS technology on the scale needed to address the problem would use up massive amounts of water, fertilizer and land. That would probably lead to large environmental problems or even destabilize key planetary systems, wrote Vera Heck of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and three colleagues.}}
  
=== Climeworks / Iceland ===
+
=== Direct Air Capture ===
[https://finance.yahoo.com/news/first-ever-apos-negative-emissions-222900756.html First-ever 'negative emissions' power plant goes online] Jon Fingas; Yahoo! Finance; 14 Oct 2017
 
: Unfortunately, it's no longer enough to cut CO2 emissions to avoid further global temperature increases. We need to remove some of the CO2 that's already there. Thankfully, that reversal is one step closer to becoming reality. Climeworks and Reykjavik Energy have started running the first power plant confirmed to produce "negative emissions" -- that is, it's removing more CO2 than it puts out. The geothermal station in Hellsheidi, Iceland is using a Climeworks module and the plant's own heat to snatch CO2 directly from the air via filters, bind it to water and send it underground where it will mineralize into harmless carbonates.
 
  
: Just like naturally forming carbon deposits, the captured CO2 should remain locked away for many millions of years, if not billions. And because the basalt layers you need to house the CO2 are relatively common, it might be relatively easy to set up negative emissions plants in many places around the world.
+
==== Climeworks / Iceland & Switzerland ====
 +
[https://finance.yahoo.com/news/first-ever-apos-negative-emissions-222900756.html First-ever 'negative emissions' power plant goes online] Jon Fingas; Yahoo! Finance; 14 Oct 2017
 +
{{Quote|
 +
Unfortunately, it's no longer enough to cut {{CO2}} emissions to avoid further global temperature increases. We need to remove some of the {{CO2}} that's already there. Thankfully, that reversal is one step closer to becoming reality. Climeworks and Reykjavik Energy have started running the first power plant confirmed to produce "negative emissions" -- that is, it's removing more {{CO2}} than it puts out. The geothermal station in Hellsheidi, Iceland is using a Climeworks module and the plant's own heat to snatch {{CO2}} directly from the air via filters, bind it to water and send it underground where it will mineralize into harmless carbonates.
  
: As always, there are catches. The Hellsheidi plant capture system is still an experiment, and the 50 metric tonnes of CO2 it'll capture per year (49.2 imperial tons) isn't about to offset many decades of fossil fuel abuse. There's also the matter of reducing the cost of capturing CO2. Even if Climeworks improves the efficiency of its system to spend $100 for every metric ton of CO2 it removes, you're still looking at hundreds of billions of dollars (if not over a trillion) spent every year to achieve the scale needed to make a difference. That will require countries to not only respect climate science, but care about it enough to spend significant chunks of their budgets on capture technology.
+
Just like naturally forming carbon deposits, the captured {{CO2}} should remain locked away for many millions of years, if not billions. And because the basalt layers you need to house the {{CO2}} are relatively common, it might be relatively easy to set up negative emissions plants in many places around the world.
 +
 
 +
As always, there are catches. The Hellsheidi plant capture system is still an experiment, and the 50 metric tonnes of {{CO2}} it'll capture per year (49.2 imperial tons) isn't about to offset many decades of fossil fuel abuse. There's also the matter of reducing the cost of capturing {{CO2}}. Even if Climeworks improves the efficiency of its system to spend $100 for every metric ton of {{CO2}} it removes, you're still looking at hundreds of billions of dollars (if not over a trillion) spent every year to achieve the scale needed to make a difference. That will require countries to not only respect climate science, but care about it enough to spend significant chunks of their budgets on capture technology.
 +
}}
  
 
[https://qz.com/1100221/the-worlds-first-negative-emissions-plant-has-opened-in-iceland-turning-carbon-dioxide-into-stone/ The world’s first “negative emissions” plant has begun operation—turning carbon dioxide into stone] Akshat Rathi; Quartz; 12 Oct 2017
 
[https://qz.com/1100221/the-worlds-first-negative-emissions-plant-has-opened-in-iceland-turning-carbon-dioxide-into-stone/ The world’s first “negative emissions” plant has begun operation—turning carbon dioxide into stone] Akshat Rathi; Quartz; 12 Oct 2017
 
: ''Discusses need for CCS, Climeworks operation in Iceland, and elsewhere''
 
: ''Discusses need for CCS, Climeworks operation in Iceland, and elsewhere''
  
=== membrane ===
+
[https://cleantechnica.com/2019/06/17/climeworks-starts-paid-carbon-dioxide-removal/ Climeworks Starts Paid Carbon Dioxide Removal] Frugal Moogal; Clean Technica; 17 Jun 2019
[http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2016/03/17/carbon-capture-membrane/ New Carbon Capture Membrane Boasts CO2 Highways] Dan Krotz; Berkeley Lab press release; 17 Mar 2016
+
{{Quote|
: A new, highly permeable carbon capture membrane developed by scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) could lead to more efficient ways of separating carbon dioxide from power plant exhaust, preventing the greenhouse gas from entering the atmosphere and contributing to climate change. The researchers focused on a hybrid membrane that is part polymer and part metal-organic framework, which is a porous three-dimensional crystal with a large internal surface area that can absorb enormous quantities of molecules.
+
Switzerland-based Climeworks is now allowing anyone in the world the opportunity to turn their travel emissions into stone.
  
=== Carbonate fuel cell ===
+
The solution that Climeworks has created works to address the three issues with carbon capture and sequestration all at the same time — by building smaller capture plants in locations that have both a power source and either a use for the carbon or the ability to immediately sequester it, Climeworks has created what they believe is a super climate-efficient process that captures more than 90% of the {{CO2}} from air and permanently sequesters it underground … even including the footprint for the manufacture of the material to make their scrubbers.
  
[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601402/exxon-has-a-clever-way-to-capture-carbon-if-it-works/ Exxon Has a Clever Way to Capture Carbon—If It Works] Richard Martin; MIT Technology Review; 6 May 2016
+
Climeworks believes that they can do this at a large scale at a competitive cost — currently, their cost is about $600 per ton, but they expect that to drop to $200 in the next three or four years, and hit a long term goal of less than $100 per ton in the next decade. Their goal is to capture 1% of the world’s emissions by 2025, an extremely ambitious timeline.
: Sticking a fuel cell in a smokestack could dramatically reduce emissions.
 
  
=== Non-thermal plasma field ===
+
To do that, they need markets for their product. To that point, Climeworks announced a partnership with Coca-Cola HBC to use Climeworks-captured carbon in Coke’s carbonated drinks, starting with Valser sparking water. While Coca Cola uses a small amount of {{CO2}} every year — an estimate by Dr. Roy Spencer for this article from CNSNews in 2008 placed it at 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide a day worldwide — last summer Coke experienced a shortage of {{CO2}} in Europe.
  
[http://midwestenergynews.com/2016/06/16/researchers-150-year-old-technology-could-provide-clean-coal-solution/ Researchers: 150-year-old technology could provide ‘clean’ coal solution] Kari Lydersen; MidWest Energy News; 16 Jun 2016
+
Turns out the food and beverage industry really relies on {{CO2}}, with over 10 million tons being used in the industry worldwide. With Climeworks, companies could have their own, potentially in-house carbon production plants, eliminating future {{CO2}} shortage concerns.
: As coal advocates seek to keep their industry viable amid tighter restrictions on carbon emissions, an Illinois researcher says a new spin on a 150-year-old technology might hold the solution. Michael Garvin, an energy expert at the Illinois Institute of Technology, says a technology known as a non-thermal plasma field has shown promise after recent tests – reducing carbon emissions by more than 90 percent – at the Scrubgrass Power Plant in Pennsylvania, which burns dirty “waste coal” to make electricity. The company Carbon Conversion International (CCI) developed technology to pass air emissions through the plasma field to extract carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide. Another byproduct – oxygen – can be fed right back into the combustion chamber. Meanwhile the carbon is concentrated into its nearly elemental form, known as “carbon black,” and sold on the market where it is used for tires, rubber, plastics, printing inks and other applications.
 
  
=== Oxygen combustion ===
+
Additionally, Climeworks has projects in the works to use their captured {{CO2}} in greenhouses and in renewable methane, pushing efforts to use (or perhaps we should say, re-use) captured {{CO2}} for industrial uses.
[http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/goodbye-smokestacks-startup-invents-zero-emission-fossil-fuel-power Goodbye smokestacks: Startup invents zero-emission fossil fuel power] Robert F. Service; Science Mag; 24 May 2017
 
: NET Power, the startup backing the new plant, says it expects to produce emission-free power at about $0.06 per kilowatt-hour. That's about the same cost as power from a state-of-the-art natural gas-fired plant—and cheaper than most renewable energy. The key to its efficiency is a new thermodynamic cycle that swaps CO2 for the steam that drives turbines in conventional plants. Invented by an unlikely trio—a retired British engineer and a pair of technology geeks who had tired of their day jobs—the scheme may soon get a bigger test. If the prototype lives up to hopes, NET Power says, it will forge ahead with a full-scale, 300-megawatt power plant—enough to power more than 200,000 homes—which could open in 2021 at a cost of about $300 million.
 
  
==== CO2 turbine ====
+
Which brings us to today — Climeworks now offers the opportunity to sequester part or all of your emissions!  They have three options, 85kg per year for $96, 255kg per year for $288, or 600kg per year at $660.The carbon capture plants are running at a geothermal power plant in Iceland and sequestering the carbon underground into basaltic rock, turning it into stone within a few years.
  
[http://www.sustainablebrands.com/news_and_views/product_service_design_innovation/sustainable_brands/new_turbine_technology_makes_zer New Turbine Technology Makes Zero-Emissions Fossil Fuel Power Plants a Reality] Sustainable Brands; 8 Dec 2017
+
While this is expensive — the math works out to $1,100 per metric ton of carbon removed — I signed up for the 85kg rate.
: North Carolina startup NET Power has found a way to power the transition to a CO2-free future without parting ways with fossil fuels with its pioneering turbine technology.
 
  
: Piloted at its natural gas plant in Houston, Texas, the technology is powered by carbon dioxide in lieu of the steam used in conventional plants, which is turned into mechanical energy and later electricity. The system draws on the Allam cycle, a process for converting fossil fuels using a single turbine into mechanical power while capturing the resulting water and CO2. This is made possible by using pure oxygen to burn the fuel. The CO2 is separated out in a heat exchanger, then compressed mechanically and a small amount is captured at high pressure, ready for pipeline transmission. The rest of the carbon is reheated and recycled into the combustion unit. The Allam cycle was developed by Rodney Allam in collaboration with 8 Rivers, an investment firm focused on innovative technology.
+
There are cheaper methods out there, (CoolEffect is one I’d suggest checking out), but I’m hoping that with some more support, Climeworks and direct air carbon capture can help.
 +
}}
  
: In addition to eliminating emissions such as CO2, particulate matter, mercury, SOx and NOx, the technology can also eliminate water consumption because it doesn’t require steam for power production.
+
=== Antarctic ===
  
: Due to the high-efficiency design of the turbines, which are one-tenth the size of traditional turbines, NET Power says it will be able to deliver emission-free power at about $0.06 per kilowatt-hour — a major milestone for carbon capture. Carbon capture technologies have traditionally been energy intensive and those costs, using up to 30 percent of a power plant’s energy and as a result driving up the cost of electricity.
+
'''A modest proposal for sequestration of {{CO2}} in the Antarctic'''
 +
by Judith Curry
 +
in Climate Etc
 +
on 24 Aug 2012
 +
[https://judithcurry.com/2012/08/24/a-modest-proposal-for-sequestration-of-co2-in-the-antarctic/ [article]]
  
: Once final testing is complete on its prototype, NET Power will begin operating its plant at full capacity in 2018. The plant is expected to produce enough electricity to power 40,000 homes. If successful, the startup intends to create a 300-megawatt power plant in 2021, which would power more than 200,000 homes. Additionally, the company plans to license the technology in an effort to drive an industry-wide shift.
+
'''{{CO2}} Snow Deposition in Antarctica to Curtail Anthropogenic Global Warming'''
 +
by Ernest Agee, Andrea Orton, John Rogers
 +
in Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology
 +
on 25 Feb 2013
 +
[http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JAMC-D-12-0110.1 [article]]
 +
| [http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JAMC-D-12-0110.1 [full text]] ''(paywalled)''
 +
| [https://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/co2_snow_deposition.pdf [manuscript]] ''(accessible)''
  
: “This is the biggest thing in carbon capture,” Howard Herzog, a chemical engineer and carbon capture expert at MIT, told Science. “It’s very sound paper. We’ll see if it works in reality. There are only a million things that can go wrong.
+
{{Quote|
 +
A scientific plan is presented that proposes the construction of carbon dioxide ({{CO2}}) deposition plants in the Antarctic for removing {{CO2}} gas from Earth’s atmosphere. The Antarctic continent offers the best environment on Earth for {{CO2}} deposition at 1 bar of pressure and temperatures closest to that required for terrestrial air {{CO2}} “snow” deposition—133 K. This plan consists of several components, including
 +
#) air chemistry and {{CO2}} snow deposition,  
 +
#) the deposition plant and a closed-loop liquid nitrogen refrigeration cycle,
 +
#) the mass storage landfill,
 +
#) power plant requirements,
 +
#) prevention of dry ice sublimation, and  
 +
#) disposal (or use) of thermal waste.  
  
=== Antarctic ===
+
Calculations demonstrate that this project is worthy of consideration, whereby 446 deposition plants supported by sixteen 1200-MW wind farms can remove 1 billion tons (1012 kg) of carbon (1 GtC) annually (a reduction of 0.5 ppmv), which can be stored in an equivalent “landfill” volume of 2 km × 2 km × 160 m (insulated to prevent dry ice sublimation). The individual deposition plant, with a 100 m × 100 m × 100 m refrigeration chamber, would produce approximately 0.4 m of {{CO2}} snow per day. The solid {{CO2}} would be excavated into a 380 m × 380 m × 10 m insulated landfill, which would allow 1 yr of storage amounting to 2.24 × 10−3 GtC. Demonstrated success of a prototype system in the Antarctic would be followed by a complete installation of all 446 plants for {{CO2}} snow deposition and storage (amounting to 1 billion tons annually), with wind farms positioned in favorable coastal regions with katabatic wind currents.
 +
}}
  
[https://judithcurry.com/2012/08/24/a-modest-proposal-for-sequestration-of-co2-in-the-antarctic/ A modest proposal for sequestration of CO2 in the Antarctic] Judith Curry; Climate Etc; 24 Aug 2012
+
=== Algal ===
  
[http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JAMC-D-12-0110.1 CO2 Snow Deposition in Antarctica to Curtail Anthropogenic Global Warming] Ernest Agee, Andrea Orton, John Rogers; Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology; 25 Feb 2013
+
[https://qz.com/1010273/the-algoland-carbon-capture-project-in-sweden-uses-algae-to-help-the-country-reach-zero-emissions/ The revolutionary technology pushing Sweden toward the seemingly impossible goal of zero emissions] Akshat Rathi; Quartz; 21 Jun 2017
: A scientific plan is presented that proposes the construction of carbon dioxide (CO2) deposition plants in the Antarctic for removing CO2 gas from Earth’s atmosphere. The Antarctic continent offers the best environment on Earth for CO2 deposition at 1 bar of pressure and temperatures closest to that required for terrestrial air CO2 “snow” deposition—133 K. This plan consists of several components, including
+
: ''Using algae to capture {{CO2}} emissions from Heidelberg Cement Degerhamn factory etc''
: 1) air chemistry and CO2 snow deposition,
 
: 2) the deposition plant and a closed-loop liquid nitrogen refrigeration cycle,
 
: 3) the mass storage landfill,
 
: 4) power plant requirements,
 
: 5) prevention of dry ice sublimation, and
 
: 6) disposal (or use) of thermal waste.
 
: Calculations demonstrate that this project is worthy of consideration, whereby 446 deposition plants supported by sixteen 1200-MW wind farms can remove 1 billion tons (1012 kg) of carbon (1 GtC) annually (a reduction of 0.5 ppmv), which can be stored in an equivalent “landfill” volume of 2 km × 2 km × 160 m (insulated to prevent dry ice sublimation). The individual deposition plant, with a 100 m × 100 m × 100 m refrigeration chamber, would produce approximately 0.4 m of CO2 snow per day. The solid CO2 would be excavated into a 380 m × 380 m × 10 m insulated landfill, which would allow 1 yr of storage amounting to 2.24 × 10−3 GtC. Demonstrated success of a prototype system in the Antarctic would be followed by a complete installation of all 446 plants for CO2 snow deposition and storage (amounting to 1 billion tons annually), with wind farms positioned in favorable coastal regions with katabatic wind currents.
 
  
[http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JAMC-D-12-0110.1 full text]
 
  
[https://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/co2_snow_deposition.pdf manuscript]
+
----
 +
----
 +
<references />

Revision as of 18:58, 24 August 2020


Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is one of the groups of clean energy technologies, along with renewables and nuclear energy, which the IPCC, International Energy Agency and others find to be necessary for effective climate mitigation. The UK's Committee on climate change also finds that there is no credible pathway to net zero without CCS.

The term CCS refers to technologies for capturing CO
2
that would otherwise be emitted to the atmosphere, and transporting it to a suitable location for permanent storage.

The related term Carbon Capture and Utilisation (CCU) refers to using the captured CO
2
in other processes rather than sequestering it.

Sometimes CCU and CCS are grouped together as "CCUS".

Big sources of CO
2
– and attractive targets for CCUS projects – are the burning of fuels containing carbon: fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas, and Biofuels, (where it is referred to as BECCS - Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage). It can also be used where CO
2
is emitted by other processes, such as cement, steel, fertiliser, and glass production.

It is claimed[1] that CCS can:

  • reduce CO
    2
    emissions from existing or new fossil fuel power stations by >90%
  • decarbonise domestic heating and vehicles via use of Hydrogen at greater scale and lower cost than via renewably powered electrolysis
  • capture CO
    2
    directly from the air using energy to reduce CO
    2
    concentration in the atmosphere
  • achieve carbon negative electricity production when applied to biomass

See also

How CCS works

"Full chain" CCS comprises:

  1. Capture:
    • Post-combustion
    • Pre-combustion
    • Oxy-combustion
  2. Transport:
    • pipeline
    • ship
  3. Storage:
    • depleted reservoirs
    • Saline Aquifers
    • Enhanced oil recovery[2]

Post-combustion capture

CO
2
is captured from the flue gases of power stations, or other industrial processes such as manufacture of steel, cement, glass etc.

The most proven technologies are based on solvents such as Amines, which have been used successfully and safely for decades, although other technologies are under investigation and development.

Pre-combustion capture

In this technology a carbon-based fuel (e.g. coal or gas) is first processed to produce, typically, CO
2
and Hydrogen. The CO
2
is captured and the Hydrogen is used as fuel which can be burned cleanly.

Oxy-combustion

In post-combustion capture the concentration of CO
2
in flue gases of, say, a power station, is typically around 4%. The flue gases also contain a lot of Nitrogen and its oxides (which can also be greenhouse gases), which came from the air which the fuel was burned in. In the oxy-combustion process oxygen is first separated from the air and used to burn the fuel. The flue gases then contain no Nitrogen or its oxides, and a much higher proportion of CO
2
which is easier to capture.

The Allam cycle takes this further and uses the CO
2
-rich flue gas directly as a working fluid to drive a turbine, rather than heating water to generate steam to drive turbines.

Expert assessments

Carbon Capture and Storage Bert Metz, Ogunlade Davidson, Heleen de Coninck, Manuela Loos, Leo Meyer; IPCC WGIII; 2005

The mandate of the report [] included the assessment of the technological maturity, the technical and economic potential to contribute to mitigation of climate change, and the costs. It also included legal and regulatory issues, public perception, environmental impacts and safety as well as issues related to inventories and accounting of greenhouse gas emission reductions. This report primarily assesses literature published after the Third Assessment Report (2001) on CO2 sources, capture systems, transport and various storage mechanisms. It does not cover biological carbon sequestration by land use, land use change and forestry, or by fertilization of oceans. The report builds upon the contribution of Working Group III to the Third Assessment Report Climate Change 2001 (Mitigation), and on the Special Report on Emission Scenarios of 2000, with respect to CO2 capture and storage in a portfolio of mitigation options. It identifies those gaps in knowledge that would need to be addressed in order to facilitate large-scale deployment.

Carbon Capture and Storage IEA

Current short-, medium- and long-term projections for global energy demand still point to fossil fuels being combusted in quantities incompatible with levels required to stabilise greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations at safe levels in the atmosphere. All technologies along the CCS chain are known. They have been in operation in various industries for decades, although at relatively small scale. However, for the sole purpose of limiting climate change, these technologies have been put together in industrial scale (>1Mt CO
2
captured and stored per year) in only a small number of installations.

General resources

CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE RESEARCH ENERGY.GOV Office of Fossil Energy

Since 1997, Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy’s Carbon Storage program has significantly advanced the carbon capture and storage (CCS) knowledge base through a diverse portfolio of applied research projects. The portfolio includes industry cost-shared technology development projects, university research grants, collaborative work with other national laboratories, and research conducted in-house through the National Energy Technology Laboratory’s (NETL) Research and Innovation Center.

The Carbon Storage Program is administered by the FE Office of Clean Coal and Carbon Management. The primary focus of the Program going forward is on early-stage R&D to develop coupled simulation tools, characterization methods, and monitoring technologies that will improve storage efficiency, reduce overall cost and project risk, decrease subsurface uncertainties, and identify ways to ensure that operations are safe, economically viable, and environmentally benign.

Key Program goals include:

  • Determining the CO
    2
    storage resource potential of on and offshore oil, gas, and saline bearing formations
  • Improving carbon storage efficiency and security by advancing new and early-stage monitoring tools and models
  • Improving capabilities to evaluate and manage environmental risks and uncertainty through integrated risk-based strategic monitoring and mitigation protocols
  • Disseminating findings and lessons learned to the broader CCS community and key stakeholders

Carbon Capture & Storage Technologies @ MIT

There are two primary types of carbon sequestration. Our program focuses on carbon dioxide capture and storage, where carbon dioxide is captured at its source (e.g., power plants, industrial processes) and subsequently stored in non-atmospheric reservoirs (e.g., depleted oil and gas reservoirs, unmineable coal seams, deep saline formations, deep ocean). The other type of carbon sequestration focuses on enhancing natural processes to increase the removal of carbon from the atmosphere (e.g., forestation).

Carbon Capture and Storage from Fossil Fuel Use Howard Herzog, Dan Golomb; Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Energy and the Environment

Contribution to Encyclopedia of Energy, to be published 2004

Carbon sequestration can be defined as the capture and secure storage of carbon that would otherwise be emitted to, or remain, in the atmosphere. The focus of this paper is the removal of CO
2
directly from industrial or utility plants and subsequently storing it in secure reservoirs. We call this carbon capture and storage (CCS). The rationale for carbon capture and storage is to enable the use of fossil fuels while reducing the emissions of CO
2
into the atmosphere, and thereby mitigating global climate change. The storage period should exceed the estimated peak periods of fossil fuel exploitation, so that if CO
2
re-emerges into the atmosphere, it should occur past the predicted peak in atmospheric CO
2
concentrations. Removing CO
2
from the atmosphere by increasing its uptake in soils and vegetation (e.g., afforestation) or in the ocean (e.g., iron fertilization), a form of carbon sequestration sometimes referred to as enhancing natural sinks, will only be addressed briefly.

Can we bury the carbon dioxide problem? Cosmos magazine; 11 Feb 2016

Overview of CCS methods and current practical work
paywalled

IPCC Climate Change report -- the joy of BECCS? Matt Rooney; IMechE; 15 Oct 2018

One of the technologies highlighted in the [IPCC SR15] report is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). The Institution’s Engineering Policy Adviser, Matt Rooney, examines this controversial approach to climate change mitigation.

Post-combustion capture

Reassessing the Efficiency Penalty from Carbon Capture in Coal-Fired Power Plants

This paper examines thermal efficiency penalties and greenhouse gas as well as other pollutant emissions associated with pulverized coal (PC) power plants equipped with postcombustion CO
2
capture for carbon sequestration. We find that, depending on the source of heat used to meet the steam requirements in the capture unit, retrofitting a PC power plant that maintains its gross power output (compared to a PC power plant without a capture unit) can cause a drop in plant thermal efficiency of 11.3–22.9%-points. This estimate for efficiency penalty is significantly higher than literature values and corresponds to an increase of about 5.3–7.7 US¢/kWh in the levelized cost of electricity (COE) over the 8.4 US¢/kWh COE value for PC plants without CO
2
capture. The results follow from the inclusion of mass and energy feedbacks in PC power plants with CO
2
capture into previous analyses, as well as including potential quality considerations for safe and reliable transportation and sequestration of CO
2
. We conclude that PC power plants with CO
2
capture are likely to remain less competitive than natural gas combined cycle (without CO
2
capture) and on-shore wind power plants, both from a levelized and marginal COE point of view.

Allam Cycle

Demonstration of the Allam Cycle: An Update on the Development Status of a High Efficiency Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Power Process Employing Full Carbon Capture by Rodney Allam, Scott Martin, Brock Forrest, Jeremy Fetvedt, Xijia Lu, David Freed, G. William Brown Jr., Takashi Sasaki, Masao Itoh, James Manning in Energy Procedia / 13th International Conference on Greenhouse Gas Control Technologies, GHGT-13, 14-18 November 2016, Lausanne, Switzerland in 2017 [[article] [PDF]

The Allam cycle is a novel CO
2
, oxy-fuel power cycle that utilizes hydrocarbon fuels while inherently capturing approximately 100% of atmospheric emissions, including nearly all CO
2
emissions at a cost of electricity that is highly competitive with the best available energy production systems that do not employ CO
2
capture. The proprietary system achieves these results through a semi-closed-loop, high-pressure, low-pressure-ratio recuperated Brayton cycle that uses supercritical CO
2
as the working fluid, dramatically reducing energy losses compared to steam- and air-based cycles. In conventional cycles, the separation and removal of low concentration combustion derived impurities such as CO
2
results in a large additional capital cost and increased parasitic power. As a result, removal in conventional cycles can increase the cost of electricity by 50% to 70%. The compelling economics of the Allam Cycle are driven by high target efficiencies, 59% net for natural gas and 51% net for coal (LHV basis) while inherently capturing nearly 100% CO
2
at pipeline pressure with low projected capital and O&M costs. Additionally, for a small reduction in performance the cycle can run substantially water free. The system employs only a single turbine, utilizes a small plant footprint, and requires smaller and fewer components than conventional hydrocarbon fueled systems. The Allam Cycle was first presented at GHGT-11. Since then, significant progress has been made, including detailed system design, component testing and the construction of a 50 MWth demonstration plant commencing in Q1 2016 and now entering commissioning as of Q4 2016. This paper will review the development status of the Allam Cycle; for the demonstration plant, the construction and commissioning status, schedule, key components, layout, and detailed design; turbine design, manufacturing status; development of a novel dynamic control system and control simulator for the demonstration plant; and other key aspects of the cycle. It will provide an update on the progress of the gasified solid fuel Allam Cycle and then address the overall Allam Cycle commercialization program, benefits and applications, and the expected design of the natural gas 300 MWe commercial NET Power plant projected for 2020.

Utility Builds Zero-Carbon Gas Power Plants by Irina Slav in OilPrice.com on 23 Jul 2019 [[article]

NET Power, a utility set up in 2010, is building zero-carbon natural gas-fired power plants in the United States and abroad and plans on making them cheap enough in the future to compete with traditional fossil fuel power plants.

Forbes’s Jeff McMachon reports that the company revealed its multiple projects, which involve carbon capture, at a workshop organized by the National Laboratories of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

"We have multiple 300MW-scale commercial projects in development," Adam Goff, a senior executive at NET Power’s parent company, 8 Rivers Capital, said. "None of them are announced yet, but we’ve got a couple in the U.S. and then some in Canada, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East and Europe—the regions of the world where we have interest in developing these projects."

According to its website, NET Power generates cheaper electricity than traditional fossil fuel-powered facilities by utilizing a proprietary thermodynamic cycle called the Allam Cycle. The cycle, the company said, allows for the elimination of all emissions, including those of carbon dioxide.

Any carbon dioxide produced in the process of burning the natural gas to power the turbines is in the form of a “high-pressure, high-quality byproduct, ready for pipeline transportation and storage.” Moreover, the company uses this high-pressure CO
2
instead of the heat used in traditional power plants to spin the turbine.

Scale required

‘We’d have to finish one new facility every working day for the next 70 years’—Why carbon capture is no panacea Andy Skuce; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; 4 Oct 2016

We’re placing far too much hope in pulling carbon dioxide out of the air, scientists warn Chelsea Harvey; Washington Post; 13 Oct 2016

In the past decade, an ambitious — but still mostly hypothetical — technological strategy for meeting our global climate goals has grown prominent in scientific discussions. Known as “negative emissions,” the idea is to remove carbon dioxide from the air using various technological means, a method that could theoretically buy the world more time when it comes to reducing our overall greenhouse-gas emissions. Recent models of future climate scenarios have assumed that this technique will be widely used in the future. Few have explored a world in which we can keep the planet’s warming within at least a 2-degree temperature threshold without the help of negative-emission technologies. But some scientists are arguing that this assumption may be a serious mistake.

In a new opinion paper, published Thursday in the journal Science, climate experts Kevin Anderson of the University of Manchester and Glen Peters of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research have argued that relying on the uncertain concept of negative emissions as a fix could lock the world into a severe climate-change pathway. “[If] we behave today like we’ve got these get-out-of-jail cards in the future, and then in 20 years we discover we don’t have this technology, then you’re already locked into a higher temperature level,” Peters said. Many possible negative-emission technologies have been proposed, from simply planting more forests (which act as carbon sinks) to designing chemical reactions that physically take the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The technology most widely included in the models is known as bioenergy combined with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS.

First, the sheer amount of bioenergy fuel required to suit the models’ assumptions already poses a problem, Peters told The Washington Post. Most of the models assume a need for an area of land at least the size of India, he said, which prompts the question of whether this would reduce the area available for food crops or force additional deforestation, which would produce more carbon emissions.

US

US government abandons carbon-capture demonstration Jeff Tollefson; Nature; 5 Feb 2015

FutureGen project would have retrofitted a coal-fired power plant to collect and bury carbon emissions.

Carbon Capture Flops in California Despite Millions in Investment Lauren Sommer; KQED Science; 24 Jan 2016

despite millions in government investment, “carbon capture and storage,” as it’s called, has largely flopped in California. Faced with high costs and public opposition, several projects have failed to move beyond the planning stage.

Southern’s $6.9 Billion Clean Coal Plant Produces First Power Mark Chediak; Bloomberg; 13 Oct 2016

Southern Co.’s $6.9 billion “clean coal” power plant in Mississippi produced electricity for the first time. The Kemper station used synthetic natural gas, converted from Mississippi lignite coal, to produce its first batch of power, Southern’s Mississippi Power utility said in a statement Wednesday. The generation brings Southern a step closer to placing the plant into full commercial operations after years of delays and cost overruns. Once in service, it’ll be the first large-scale power plant in the U.S. to gasify coal and capture carbon before it’s released into the atmosphere. The U.S. Department of Energy provided $245 million in a grants for the project, which the coal industry had been banking on as a potential way toward developing cleaner-burning technologies as pollution limits take hold.

America’s first ‘clean coal’ plant is now operational — and another is on the way Chris Mooney; Washington Post; 10 Jan 2017

The first large scale U.S. “clean coal” facility was declared operational Tuesday — by the large energy firm NRG Energy and JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration Corp. Their Petra Nova project, not far outside of Houston, captured carbon dioxide from the process of coal combustion for the first time in September, and has now piped 100,000 tons of it from the plant to the West Ranch oil field 80 miles away, where the carbon dioxide is used to force additional oil from the ground. The companies say that the plant can capture over 90 percent of the carbon dioxide released from the equivalent of a 240 megawatt, or million watt, coal unit, which translates into 5,000 tons of carbon dioxide per day or over 1 million tons per year. They’re calling it “the world’s largest post-combustion carbon capture system.”

But there is another coal plant near completion in the United States that will also capture carbon dioxide — but using a very different approach. It’s the Kemper Plant, being operated by Mississippi Power, a subsidiary of Southern Co., and expected to be operational Jan. 31. This plant has been designed to turn lignite, a type of coal, into a gas called syngas, stripping out some carbon dioxide in the process. The syngas is burned for electricity and the CO2 is then again shipped to an oil field to aid in additional oil recovery. Thus, at Petra Nova the capturing of carbon occurs after the coal has been burned — or “post-combustion” — whereas at Kemper, it happens beforehand.

UK

See also H21 North of England

White Rose

The world’s first commercial scale, full chain, carbon capture and storage coal-fired power plant is being proposed by developer, Capture Power. The White Rose Carbon Capture and Storage Project (White Rose CCS Project), will comprise a state-of-the-art coal-fired power plant that is equipped with full carbon capture and storage technology. The project is intended to prove CCS technology at commercial scale and demonstrate it as a competitive form of low carbon power generation and as an important technology in tackling climate change. It will also play an important role in establishing a CO2 transportation and storage network in the Yorkshire and Humber area.

News: Government withdraws CCS Commercialisation Programme 25/11/2015

Today, following the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement, HM Government confirmed that the £1 billion ring-fenced capital budget for the Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Competition is no longer available. Commenting on the news that the budget for the CCS competition is no longer available, Leigh Hackett, CEO of Capture Power, said: “We are surprised and very disappointed by the Government’s decision to cancel the £1bn CCS Commercialisation Programme more than three years into the competition. “It is too early to make any definitive decisions about the future of the White Rose CCS Project, however, it is difficult to imagine its continuation in the absence of crucial Government support.”

Treasury cut to carbon capture will cost UK £30bn, says watchdog Damian Carrington; The Guardian; 20 Jul 2016

The government’s cancellation of a pioneering £1bn competition to capture and store carbon emissions may have pushed up the bill for meeting the UK’s climate targets by £30bn, according to a report from the UK’s official spending watchdog. The National Audit Office (NAO) report, published on Wednesday, says the move has delayed by a decade the deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology in the UK, which takes emissions from power stations and industry and buries them so they do not contribute to global warming. The Treasury was warned by officials about the cost implications and that the last-minute cancellation could cause damage to the government’s reputation with industry and the international community. But the government, amid cuts to spending, decided the competition was aiming to deliver CCS before it was necessary and cost-efficient to do so. Both the UK government’s official advisers, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), and the UN’s climate panel have warned that the cost of tackling climate change will be doubled without CCS, as more expensive alternatives are needed instead. The UK is well placed to develop CCS, with access to depleted oil and gas fields in the North Sea to store CO
2
. But these now risk being shut down before CCS is developed, the NAO report said. The CCS competition axed in November was the second cancelled by government, with the first starting in 2007 and ending in 2011. The NAO said there is now “no viable way to achieve deep emissions reductions from the industrial sector in the near future”.

CCSA report

Lowest Cost Decarbonisation for the UK: The Critical Role of CCS Carbon Capture and Storage Association; Sep 2016

Report to the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy from the Parliamentary Advisory Group on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)

UK must move now on carbon capture to save consumers billions, says report Damian Carrington; The Guardian; 12 Sep 2016

The UK must immediately kickstart an industry to capture and bury carbon emissions in order to save consumers billions a year from the cost of meeting climate change targets, according to a high-level advisory group appointed by ministers. This requires the setting up of a new state-backed company to create the network needed to pipe the emissions into exhausted oil and gas fields under the North Sea, the group said.

Failing to deliver CCS would hugely increase the cost of tackling climate change, according to the government’s official climate advisors, the National Audit Office and the UN’s climate science panel.

CCS could also potentially enable hydrogen to solve the problem of cutting the emissions from the nation’s gas boilers and stoves, currently 25% of all emissions and a major factor in the UK’s imminent failure to meet clean energy targets.

Natural gas can be converted to hydrogen and the CO
2
produced buried using CCS. The hydrogen, which produces only water when burned, could then replace the gas in the national grid. This could also provide fuel for hydrogen-powered cars, as well as cutting the significant air pollution caused by gas boilers.

Carbon Capture and Storage – time for the UK to get back on track Stephen Tindale; Climate Answers; 20 Oct 2016

A new report entitled Lowest Cost Decarbonisation for the UK: The Critical Role of CCS, argues that the UK government should drastically rethink its CCS policy, and in effect u-turn again to get back on track with CCS. A cross-party group, headed by Lord Oxburgh, leading geologist and ex-chair of Shell, was invited by previous Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Amber Rudd to assess the CCS options in the UK. They conclude that CCS is not only clearly achievable, with all aspects of the supply chain demonstrated, but also potentially cheaper than nuclear or renewable options. The novel nature of the technology however, combined with an insufficient carbon price, means that government, rather than industry, must be the driving force behind the technology’s development.

India

India's double first in climate battle Roger Harrabin; BBC; 3 Jan 2017

Two world-leading clean energy projects have opened in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. An industrial plant is capturing the CO
2
emissions from a coal boiler and using the CO
2
to make valuable chemicals. The industrial plant appears especially significant as it offers a breakthrough by capturing CO
2
without subsidy. Built at a chemical plant in the port city of Tuticorin, it is projected to save 60,000 tonnes of CO
2
emissions a year by incorporating them into the chemical recipe for soda ash - otherwise known as baking soda.

The chemical used in stripping the CO
2
from the flue gas was invented by two young Indian chemists. They failed to raise Indian finance to develop it, but their firm, Carbonclean Solutions, working with the Institute of Chemical Technology at Mumbai and Imperial College in London, got backing from the UK's entrepreneur support scheme. Their technique uses a form of salt to bond with CO
2
molecules in the boiler chimney. The firm says it is more efficient than typical amine compounds used for the purpose. They say it also needs less energy, produces less alkaline waste and allows the use of a cheaper form of steel - all radically reducing the cost of the whole operation.

Canada - Saskpower / Saskatchewan Boundary Dam

Boundary Dam Carbon Capture Project Saskpower

SaskPower CCS Tour Vimeo

Media Gallery

Boundary Dam Fact Sheet: Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage Project Carbon Capture & Storage Technologies @ MIT

IEA hails historic launch of carbon capture and storage project IEA; 1 Oct 2014

The IEA believes CCS will have to play a central role in an ambitious, climate-friendly future energy scenario, accounting for one-sixth of required emissions reductions by 2050. IEA analysis has shown that without significant deployment of CCS, more than two-thirds of current proven fossil-fuel reserves cannot be commercialised before 2050 if the increase in global temperatures is to remain below 2 degrees Celsius. Several CCS projects are under construction or in advanced stages of planning. Early 2015 should see the start of operations for another large power-CCS project in Kemper County, Mississippi. Further projects are currently under construction elsewhere in the United States and Canada plus Saudi Arabia and Australia.

Integrated Carbon Capture and Storage at Saskpower's Boundary Dam Power Station IEAGHG; Aug 2015

FOR SASKPOWER, owner and operator of the retrofitted Boundary Dam Power Unit 3 (BD3) that now incorporates carbon capture and storage (CCS), this event was the culmination of decades of work to continue operating coal-fired power-generating stations, while at the same time mitigating the climate change impact of associated air emissions. The CO
2
captured at BD3 is geologically stored at two locations: in an oil reservoir approximately 1.4 kilometres deep at Cenovus’ CO
2
–EOR operation near Weyburn, Saskatchewan, and in a deep saline aquifer approximately 3.2 kilometres deep at the SaskPower Carbon Storage and Research Centre, located near the Boundary Dam Power Station. The latter geological storage site is the subject of the measurement, monitoring and verification (MMV) activities of the Aquistore Project that is managed by the Petroleum Technology Research Centre in Regina, Saskatchewan. SaskPower had forged ahead with design and construction of the BD3 ICCS retrofit well in advance of GHG Regulations being enacted in Canada, which came into effect on July 1, 2015. This was a strategic and environmentally-responsible decision to ensure continued use of lignite coal reserves in Saskatchewan that could last 250–500 years. The investment in the approx. 120 MW (net) BD3 power unit’s retrofit and carbon capture plant was approximately C$1.467 billion. This report explores the journey that SaskPower made from the 1980s to mid-2015 in pursuit of clean coal power generation. SaskPower pursued various technology options for carbon capture from oxyfuel combustion to amine solvent absorption that ultimately led to the decision to select the commercially unproven CANSOLV amine solvent carbon dioxide capture process. SaskPower then coupled that technology with Shell Cansolv’s proven sulphur dioxide capture process to simplify the capture plant operation and to further reduce emissions.

Canada switches on world's first carbon capture power plant Suzanne Goldenberg; The Guardian; 1 Oct 2014

Boundary Dam held up as first commercial-scale CCS plant and proof that coal-burning is compatible with cutting emissions Canada has switched on the first large-scale coal-fired power plant fitted with a technology that proponents say enables the burning of fossil fuels without tipping the world into a climate catastrophe. The project, the first commercial-scale plant equipped with carbon capture and storage technology, was held up by the coal industry as a real life example that it is possible to go on burning the dirtiest of fossil fuels while avoiding dangerous global warming. Saskatchewan’s state-owned electricity provider is due to cut the ribbon on the $1.3 billion Canadian project on Thursday.

SNC-Lavalin-built carbon capture facility has 'serious design issues': SaskPower Geoff Leo; CBC News; 27 Oct 2015

An internal SaskPower briefing note obtained by the NDP suggests the much-celebrated Boundary Dam carbon capture project near Estevan, Sask., has "serious design issues". The note goes on to say the company contracted to engineer, procure, and build the capture facility, SNC-Lavalin "has neither the will or the ability to fix some of these fundamental flaws." The note, dated Sept. 30, 2014, said SaskPower has already paid 97 per cent of the value of the three subcontracts SaskPower had with SNC — $533 million of $549 million. It says at the time SaskPower was withholding $6.5 million in payments from SNC because the Crown corporation was having to pay to correct problems with SNC's work.

Technology to Make Clean Energy From Coal Is Stumbling in Practice IAN AUSTEN; N Y Times; 29 Mar 2016

OTTAWA — An electrical plant on the Saskatchewan prairie was the great hope for industries that burn coal. In the first large-scale project of its kind, the plant was equipped with a technology that promised to pluck carbon out of the utility’s exhaust and bury it underground, transforming coal into a cleaner power source. In the months after opening, the utility and the provincial government declared the project an unqualified success. But the $1.1 billion project is now looking like a green dream. Known as SaskPower’s Boundary Dam 3, the project has been plagued by multiple shutdowns, has fallen way short of its emissions targets, and faces an unresolved problem with its core technology. The costs, too, have soared, requiring tens of millions of dollars in new equipment and repairs.

Enhanced Oil Recovery

Can Oil Companies Save the World from Global Warming? David Biello; Scientific American; 19 Apr 2016

Oil firms might pay to use CO
2
emissions from power plants, but low petroleum prices could doom the effort

Cement production

CEMENT’S ROLE IN A CARBON-NEUTRAL FUTURE Jeffrey Rissman; Energy Innovation Policy & Technology LLC; Nov 2018

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The manufacture of cement, a constituent of concrete, is responsible for 5.6% of global carbon dioxide (CO
2
) emissions. 30-40% of these emissions are from thermal fuels (predominantly coal) used to heat the cement kiln, while 60-70% of the emissions are “process emissions” from the breakdown of limestone in a calcination reaction. (A small amount of emissions are also attributable to the generation of electricity used by cement makers.)

After its manufacture, cement naturally sequesters CO
2
from the atmosphere in a process called “carbonation.” Carbonation rates vary considerably with concrete properties, which differ by world region. Globally, roughly a third of cement’s process emissions are re-absorbed within the first two years, and over the course of decades, this share rises to 48%. Cement carbonation is relevant on a global scale but has been omitted from national emissions inventories and global estimates.

Various techniques exist to lower CO
2
emissions from the cement industry, including: energy efficiency technologies, adopting lower-emissions fuels to heat the kiln, substituting other materials for clinker (the constituent of cement responsible for cement’s process emissions), and improving concrete strength or longevity (thereby reducing demand for new concrete). Carbon capture technologies, including post-combustion and oxyfuel technologies, provide options to capture CO
2
emissions that cannot otherwise be avoided. Novel technologies by private firms CarbonCure and Solidia offer additional approaches to reducing emissions from the cement industry.

Modeling of three scenarios finds that capturing 80% of cement’s process emissions (and none of the thermal emissions) by 2050 is sufficient to make cement carbon-neutral, as natural carbonation offsets the remaining emissions. If the thermal fuel supply were to be fully decarbonized by 2050, a process emissions capture rate of 53% achieves carbon-neutral cement. Higher capture rates than these would provide net negative CO
2
emissions and the possibility that simply making concrete could reduce atmospheric CO
2
concentrations

Concrete change: Making cement carbon-negative Jeffrey Rissman; Green Biz; 6 Dec 2018

Cement is one of the world’s most-used building materials, with production reaching 4.3 billion tons/year in 2014 and growing 5 percent to 6 percent annually. Today, it is responsible for 5.6 percent of global carbon dioxide (CO
2
) emissions and a major contributor to climate change — if the cement industry were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest emitter. To stay below 2 degrees Celsius of global warming, cement’s carbon intensity must be reduced to near-zero as soon as technically feasible.

Fortunately, the right policies and technologies can make cement manufacturing a net climate benefit. During its lifetime and after demolition, cement naturally captures a significant fraction of the CO
2
emitted during its manufacture. When this effect is combined with carbon capture and storage (CCS), energy efficiency technologies and biofuels or electrification, cement can remove more CO
2
than it adds to the atmosphere.

In the new book "Designing Climate Solutions: A Policy Guide to Low-Carbon Energy," my co-authors and I identify a suite of policies such as carbon pricing, industry efficiency or emissions standards, and government research and development (R&D) support to help ensure the necessary technologies exist and incentivize their use.

Our research shows (PDF) that depending on the extent thermal fuel supply is decarbonized, a CO
2
capture rate between 53 percent and 80 percent will make cement carbon-neutral, and higher CCS capture rates achieve net carbon-negative cement. This offers the prospect of a world where simply constructing buildings and infrastructure reduces atmospheric CO
2
concentrations and contributes to the fight against climate change.

Austrian companies collaborate on industrial-scale CO2 capture and utilisation project Karen Laird; Sustainable Plastics; 25 June 2020

Austrian CCU project to capture CO
2
from cement production and make hydrocarbon fuels using Hydrogen from renewable electricity.

Lafarge Zementwerke, a member of LafargeHolcim Group, OMV, utility company Verbund and Borealis have launched plans for a joint project aimed at advancing the transformation towards a Zero CO2 economy in Europe.

The companies have co-signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) under which they agree to collaborate across industry sectors in a project called ‘Carbon2ProductAustria’ - or C2PAT, for short. The idea is to establish CO2 as a valuable raw material through the creation of a cross-sectorial value chain. Green hydrogen will be used to recycle the captured greenhouse gas.

The project involves planning and constructing in three phases a full-scale plant by 2030 to capture CO2 emitted during the cement production process, for utilization in the production of synthetic fuels, plastics or other chemicals. The facility would eventually capture almost 100% of the annually emitted 700,000 tons of CO2 at Lafarge’s cement plant in Mannersdorf, Austria.

Phase 1 consists of the evaluation and development by the partners of a joint strategy for the project development, business modelling and process engineering. Based on the results of phase 1, phase 2 would see a cluster of industrial pilot plants in the eastern part of Austria being technically developed and realised until 2023. In Phase 3, the operations would be fully scaled up for the capture and use of 700,000 tons of CO2.

"Ultimately, CO2-neutral cement production can only be possible with the implementation of breakthrough technologies, like Carbon Capture, which is why we have great expectations for the C2PAT project", said Lafarge CEO José Antonio Primo.

Fueled by green hydrogen - from renewable energies- produced by Verbund, the captured CO2 will be transformed by OMV into renewable based hydrocarbons.

“Green hydrogen is produced when water is electrolyzed using electricity from renewable sources. For the Carbon2ProductAustria-Project we will use green electricity from our renewable generation portfolio,” explained Michael Strugl, Deputy CEO of Verbund.

The hydrocarbons produced by OMV will be used to produce renewably- based fuels or be utilized by Borealis as a feedstock for the production of renewably-based, value-add plastics. If these plastics are subsequently recycled at the end of life, a nearly closed CO2 loop is created. As OMV chairman of the executive board and CEO noted, CO2 is not just a ‘greenhouse gas that we have to reduce. It is also a valuable raw material from which we can produce synthetic fuels and feedstock for the chemical industry’.

Technology

Membrane

New Carbon Capture Membrane Boasts CO2 Highways Dan Krotz; Berkeley Lab press release; 17 Mar 2016

A new, highly permeable carbon capture membrane developed by scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) could lead to more efficient ways of separating carbon dioxide from power plant exhaust, preventing the greenhouse gas from entering the atmosphere and contributing to climate change. The researchers focused on a hybrid membrane that is part polymer and part metal-organic framework, which is a porous three-dimensional crystal with a large internal surface area that can absorb enormous quantities of molecules.

Carbonate fuel cell

Exxon Has a Clever Way to Capture Carbon—If It Works Richard Martin; MIT Technology Review; 6 May 2016

Sticking a fuel cell in a smokestack could dramatically reduce emissions.

Non-thermal plasma field

Researchers: 150-year-old technology could provide ‘clean’ coal solution Kari Lydersen; MidWest Energy News; 16 Jun 2016

As coal advocates seek to keep their industry viable amid tighter restrictions on carbon emissions, an Illinois researcher says a new spin on a 150-year-old technology might hold the solution. Michael Garvin, an energy expert at the Illinois Institute of Technology, says a technology known as a non-thermal plasma field has shown promise after recent tests – reducing carbon emissions by more than 90 percent – at the Scrubgrass Power Plant in Pennsylvania, which burns dirty “waste coal” to make electricity. The company Carbon Conversion International (CCI) developed technology to pass air emissions through the plasma field to extract carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide. Another byproduct – oxygen – can be fed right back into the combustion chamber. Meanwhile the carbon is concentrated into its nearly elemental form, known as “carbon black,” and sold on the market where it is used for tires, rubber, plastics, printing inks and other applications.

Allam cycle

The Allam cycle uses oxy-combustion with a turbine driven by supercritical CO2 rather than steam.

Goodbye smokestacks: Startup invents zero-emission fossil fuel power Robert F. Service; Science Mag; 24 May 2017

NET Power, the startup backing the new plant, says it expects to produce emission-free power at about $0.06 per kilowatt-hour. That's about the same cost as power from a state-of-the-art natural gas-fired plant—and cheaper than most renewable energy. The key to its efficiency is a new thermodynamic cycle that swaps CO
2
for the steam that drives turbines in conventional plants. Invented by an unlikely trio—a retired British engineer and a pair of technology geeks who had tired of their day jobs—the scheme may soon get a bigger test. If the prototype lives up to hopes, NET Power says, it will forge ahead with a full-scale, 300-megawatt power plant—enough to power more than 200,000 homes—which could open in 2021 at a cost of about $300 million.

New Turbine Technology Makes Zero-Emissions Fossil Fuel Power Plants a Reality Sustainable Brands; 8 Dec 2017

North Carolina startup NET Power has found a way to power the transition to a CO
2
-free future without parting ways with fossil fuels with its pioneering turbine technology.

Piloted at its natural gas plant in Houston, Texas, the technology is powered by carbon dioxide in lieu of the steam used in conventional plants, which is turned into mechanical energy and later electricity. The system draws on the Allam cycle, a process for converting fossil fuels using a single turbine into mechanical power while capturing the resulting water and CO
2
. This is made possible by using pure oxygen to burn the fuel. The CO
2
is separated out in a heat exchanger, then compressed mechanically and a small amount is captured at high pressure, ready for pipeline transmission. The rest of the carbon is reheated and recycled into the combustion unit. The Allam cycle was developed by Rodney Allam in collaboration with 8 Rivers, an investment firm focused on innovative technology.

In addition to eliminating emissions such as CO
2
, particulate matter, mercury, SO
x
and NO
x
, the technology can also eliminate water consumption because it doesn’t require steam for power production.

Due to the high-efficiency design of the turbines, which are one-tenth the size of traditional turbines, NET Power says it will be able to deliver emission-free power at about $0.06 per kilowatt-hour — a major milestone for carbon capture. Carbon capture technologies have traditionally been energy intensive and those costs, using up to 30 percent of a power plant’s energy and as a result driving up the cost of electricity.

Once final testing is complete on its prototype, NET Power will begin operating its plant at full capacity in 2018. The plant is expected to produce enough electricity to power 40,000 homes. If successful, the startup intends to create a 300-megawatt power plant in 2021, which would power more than 200,000 homes. Additionally, the company plans to license the technology in an effort to drive an industry-wide shift.

“This is the biggest thing in carbon capture,” Howard Herzog, a chemical engineer and carbon capture expert at MIT, told Science. “It’s very sound paper. We’ll see if it works in reality. There are only a million things that can go wrong.”

Carbon powder adsorption

New powder could help cut CO
2
emissions
University of Waterloo news; 18 Dec 2018

Scientists at the University of Waterloo have created a powder that could capture carbon dioxide (CO
2
) from factories and power plants.

The advanced carbon powder, developed using a novel process in the lab of Zhongwei Chen, a chemical engineering professor at Waterloo, could filter and remove CO
2
from emissions at facilities powered by fossil fuels before it is released into the atmosphere with twice the efficiency of conventional materials.

CO
2
molecules stick to the surface of carbon when they come in contact with it, a process known as adsorption. Since it is abundant, inexpensive and environmentally friendly, that makes carbon an excellent material to capture CO
2
, a greenhouse gas that is the primary contributor to global warming.

The researchers, who collaborated with colleagues at several universities in China, set out to improve adsorption performance by manipulating the size and concentration of pores in carbon materials.

The technique they developed uses heat and salt to extract a black carbon powder from plant matter. Carbon spheres that make up the powder have many, many pores and the vast majority of them are less than one-millionth of a metre in diameter.

Once saturated with carbon dioxide at large point sources such as fossil fuel power plants, the powder would be transported to storage sites and buried in underground geological formations to prevent CO
2
release into the atmosphere.

In-situ ion-activated carbon nanospheres with tunable ultramicroporosity for superior CO
2
capture
Zhen Zhang et al; Researchgate; Nov 2018

Ultramicroporous carbon materials play a critical role in CO
2
capture and separation, however facile approaches to design ultramicroporous carbon with controllable amount, ratio and size of pores are still challenging. Herein, a novel strategy to design carbon nanospheres with abundant, uniform, and tunable ultramicroporosity was developed based on an in-situ ionic activation methodology. The adjustable ion-exchange capacity derived from oxidative functionalization was found capable of substantially governing the ionic activation and precisely regulating the ultramicroporosity in the resultant product. An ultrahigh ultramicropore content of 95.5% was achieved for the optimally- designed carbon nanospheres, which demonstrated excellent CO
2
capture performances with extremely high capacities of 1.58 mmol g-1 at typical flue gas conditions and 4.30 mmol g-1 at 25 °C and ambient pressure. Beyond that, the CO
2
adsorption mechanism in ultramicropore was also investigated through molecular dynamics simulation to guide the pore size optimization. This work provides a novel and facile guideline to engineer carbon materials with abundant and tunable ultramicroporosity towards superior CO
2
capture performance, which also delivers great potential in extensive applications such as water purification, catalysis, and energy storage.

Electrical - electroswing adsorber

This new ‘battery’ aims to spark a carbon capture revolution Nsikan Akpan; PBS; 15 Nov 2019

Chemical engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a new device that can remove carbon dioxide from the air at any concentration. Published in October in the journal Energy & Environmental Science, the project is the latest bid to directly capture CO
2
emissions and keep them from accelerating and worsening future climate disasters.

Think of the invention as a quasi-battery, in terms of its shape, its construction and how it works to collect carbon dioxide. You pump electricity into the battery, and while the device stores this charge, a chemical reaction occurs that absorbs CO
2
from the surrounding atmosphere — a process known as direct air capture. The CO
2
can be extracted by discharging the battery, releasing the gas, so the CO
2
then can be pumped into the ground. The researchers describe this back-and-forth as electroswing adsorption.

BECCS

BECCS deployment: a reality check by MATHILDE FAJARDY, DR. ALEXANDRE KÖBERLE, DR. NIALL MAC DOWELL, DR. ANDREA FANTUZZI of Imperial College, Grantham Institute in January 2019 [pdf]

Headlines

  • Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is presented as a pivotal technology in most pathways for limiting global warming to 1.5 or 2°C. However, it is doubtful that BECCS can fulfil this role alone.
  • BECCS is not a single technology. Understanding the value and challenges associated with each BECCS technology is complex but vital.
  • Depending on the conditions of its deployment, BECCS may be beneficial but it can also be detrimental to climate change mitigation, due to its lifecycle CO
    2
    balance, energy balance and resource use.
  • It is challenging to ensure that BECCS delivers timely and sustainable net carbon removal, while also generating energy at an appropriate scale.
  • Considering these uncertainties and the potential impact on resources, biodiversity and soil health, the scale of BECCS deployment should be limited only to circumstances where it is proven to be beneficial.
  • Good governance and financial incentives are required to stimulate high-quality BECCS at this limited scale.
  • Policy makers should be sceptical about a future that is uniquely or heavily reliant on BECCS, and instead prepare for and implement alternative mitigation options as soon as possible.

The Dirty Secret of the World’s Plan to Avert Climate Disaster by ABBY RABINOWITZ, AMANDA SIMSON in Wired on 10 Dec 2017 [article]

IN 2014 HENRIK Karlsson, a Swedish entrepreneur whose startup was failing, was lying in bed with a bankruptcy notice when the BBC called. The reporter had a scoop: On the eve of releasing a major report, the United Nation’s climate change panel appeared to be touting an untried technology as key to keeping planetary temperatures at safe levels. The technology went by the inelegant acronym BECCS, and Karlsson was apparently the only BECCS expert the reporter could find.

Karlsson was amazed. The bankruptcy notice was for his BECCS startup, which he’d founded seven years earlier after an idea came to him while watching a late-night television show in Gothenburg, Sweden. The show explored the benefits of capturing carbon dioxide before it was emitted from power plants. It’s the technology behind the much-touted notion of “clean coal,” a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow down climate change.

Karlsson, then a 27-year-old studying to be an operatic tenor, was no climate scientist or engineer. Still, the TV show got him thinking: During photosynthesis plants naturally suck carbon dioxide from the air, storing it in their leaves, branches, seeds, roots, and trunks. So what if you grew crops and then burned those crops for electricity, being sure to capture all of the carbon dioxide emitted? You’d then store all that dangerous CO2 underground. Such a power plant wouldn’t just be emitting less greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, it would effectively be sucking CO
2
from the air. Karlsson was enraptured with the idea. He was going to help avert a global disaster.

The next morning, he ran to the library, where he read a 2001 Science paper by Austrian modeler Michael Obersteiner theorizing the same idea, which was later dubbed “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage”—BECCS. Karlsson was sold. He launched his BECCS startup in 2007, riding the wave of optimism generated by Al Gore’s first climate change movie. Karlsson’s company even became a finalist in Richard Branson’s Virgin Earth Challenge, which was offering $25 million for a scalable solution for removing greenhouse gases. But by 2014, Karlsson’s startup was a failure. He took the BBC’s call as a sign that he shouldn’t give up.

In the report, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—universally known by yet another acronym, IPCC—presented results from hundreds of computer-model-generated scenarios in which the planet’s temperature rises less than 2 degrees Celsius (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, the limit eventually set by the Paris Climate Agreement.

The 2°C goal was a theoretical limit for how much warming humans could accept. For leading climatologist James Hansen, even the 2°C limit is unsafe. And without emissions cuts, global temperatures are projected to rise by 4°C by the end of the century. Many scientists are reluctant to make predictions, but the apocalyptic litany of what a 4°C world could hold includes widespread drought, famine, climate refugees by the millions, civilization-threatening warfare, and a sea level rise that would permanently drown much of New York, Miami, Mumbai, Shanghai, and other coastal cities.

But here’s where things get weird. The UN report envisions 116 scenarios in which global temperatures are prevented from rising more than 2°C. In 101 of them, that goal is accomplished by sucking massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a concept called “negative emissions”—chiefly via BECCS. And in these scenarios to prevent planetary disaster, this would need to happen by midcentury, or even as soon as 2020. Like a pharmaceutical warning label, one footnote warned that such “methods may carry side effects and long-term consequences on a global scale.”

Indeed, following the scenarios’ assumptions, just growing the crops needed to fuel those BECCS plants would require a landmass one to two times the size of India, climate researchers Kevin Anderson and Glen Peters wrote. The energy BECCS was supposed to supply is on par with all of the coal-fired power plants in the world. In other words, the models were calling for an energy revolution—one that was somehow supposed to occur well within millennials’ lifetimes.

Today that vast future sector of the economy amounts to one working project in the world: a repurposed corn ethanol plant in Decatur, Illinois. Which raises a question: Has the world come to rely on an imaginary technology to save it?

Vast bioenergy plantations could stave off climate change—and radically reshape the planet by Julia Rosen in Science magazine on 15 Feb 2018 [article]

On a sunny day this past October, three dozen people file into a modest, mint-green classroom at Montana State University (MSU) in Bozeman to glimpse a vision of the future. Some are scientists, but most are people with some connection to the land: extension agents who work with farmers, and environmentalists representing organizations such as The Nature Conservancy. They all know that climate change will reshape the region in the coming decades, but that's not what they've come to discuss. They are here to talk about the equally profound impacts of trying to stop it.

Paul Stoy, an ecologist at MSU, paces in front of whiteboards in a powder blue shirt and jeans as he describes how a landscape already dominated by agriculture could be transformed yet again by a different green revolution: vast plantations of crops, sown to sop up carbon dioxide (CO
2
) from the sky. "We have this new energy economy that's necessary to avoid dangerous climate change, but how is that going to look on the ground?" he asks.

In 2015, the Paris climate agreement established a goal of limiting global warming to "well below" 2°C. In the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, researchers surveyed possible road maps for reaching that goal and found something unsettling. In most model scenarios, simply cutting emissions isn't enough. To limit warming, humanity also needs negative emissions technologies (NETs) that, by the end of the century, would remove more CO
2
from the atmosphere than humans emit. The technologies would buy time for society to rein in carbon emissions, says Naomi Vaughan, a climate change scientist at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, U.K. "They allow you to emit more CO
2
and take it back at a later date."

Whether that's doable is another question. Some NETs amount to giant air-purifying machines, and many remain more fiction than fact. Few operate at commercial scales today, and some researchers fear they offer policymakers a dangerous excuse to drag their feet on climate action in the hopes that future inventions will clean up the mess. "In many ways, we're saying we expect a bit of magic to occur," says Chris Field, a climate scientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who instead favors drastic emissions reductions. Others say we no longer have a choice—that we have dallied too long to meet the Paris targets solely by tightening our belts. "We probably need aggressive and immediate mitigation, plus some negative emissions," says Pete Smith, a soil scientist and bioenergy expert at the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom.

One particular technology has quietly risen to prominence—thanks to global models—and it is the one on tap in Bozeman. The idea is to cultivate fast-growing grasses and trees to suck CO
2
out of the atmosphere and then burn them at power plants to generate energy. But instead of being released back into the atmosphere in the exhaust, the crops' carbon would be captured and pumped underground. The technique is known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or—among climate wonks—simply as BECCS.

Illinois ethanol plant

Negative emissions tested at world’s first major BECCS facility by Carbon Brief on 31 May 2016 [article]

Decatur, Illinois, is a city built on corn. At the centre of its economy are two giant agribusinesses, Tate & Lyle and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), which together grind thousands of bushels a day into syrups, sweeteners, ethanol fuel and other useful products. Thanks to the second of these companies, Decatur is also a city that is built on CO2 — literally. For the past nine years, ADM has been part of an ongoing experiment to capture the emissions from its ethanol plant and trap it in the layer of sandstone that lies beneath the Illinois corn belt.

The quest to capture and store carbon – and slow climate change — just reached a new milestone by Chris Mooney in Washington Post on 10 April 2017 [article]

A new large-scale technology has launched in Decatur, Illinois that, by combining together corn-based fuels with the burial of carbon dioxide deep underground, could potentially result in the active removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

Limitations: planetary boundaries

Biomass-based negative emissions difficult to reconcile with planetary boundaries by Vera Heck, Dieter Gerten, Wolfgang Lucht, Alexander Popp in Nature Climate Change [paper]

Under the Paris Agreement, 195 nations have committed to holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre industrial levels and to strive to limit the increase to 1.5 °C (ref. 1). It is noted that this requires "a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of the century"1. This either calls for zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions or a balance between positive and negative emissions (NE)2,3. Roadmaps and socio-economic scenarios compatible with a 2 °C or 1.5 °C goal depend upon NE via bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) to balance remaining GHG emissions4–7. However, large-scale deployment of BECCS would imply significant impacts on many Earth system components besides atmospheric CO2 concentrations8,9. Here we explore the feasibility of NE via BECCS from dedicated plantations and potential trade-offs with planetary boundaries (PBs)10,11 for multiple socio-economic pathways. We show that while large-scale BECCS is intended to lower the pressure on the PB for climate change, it would most likely steer the Earth system closer to the PB for freshwater use and lead to further transgression of the PBs for land-system change, biosphere integrity and biogeochemical flows.

This big new idea for stopping climate change would cause even bigger problems, scientists say by Chris Mooney in Washington Post on 22 Jan 2018 [article]

scientists argue that deploying BECCS technology on the scale needed to address the problem would use up massive amounts of water, fertilizer and land. That would probably lead to large environmental problems or even destabilize key planetary systems, wrote Vera Heck of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and three colleagues.

Direct Air Capture

Climeworks / Iceland & Switzerland

First-ever 'negative emissions' power plant goes online Jon Fingas; Yahoo! Finance; 14 Oct 2017

Unfortunately, it's no longer enough to cut CO
2
emissions to avoid further global temperature increases. We need to remove some of the CO
2
that's already there. Thankfully, that reversal is one step closer to becoming reality. Climeworks and Reykjavik Energy have started running the first power plant confirmed to produce "negative emissions" -- that is, it's removing more CO
2
than it puts out. The geothermal station in Hellsheidi, Iceland is using a Climeworks module and the plant's own heat to snatch CO
2
directly from the air via filters, bind it to water and send it underground where it will mineralize into harmless carbonates.

Just like naturally forming carbon deposits, the captured CO
2
should remain locked away for many millions of years, if not billions. And because the basalt layers you need to house the CO
2
are relatively common, it might be relatively easy to set up negative emissions plants in many places around the world.

As always, there are catches. The Hellsheidi plant capture system is still an experiment, and the 50 metric tonnes of CO
2
it'll capture per year (49.2 imperial tons) isn't about to offset many decades of fossil fuel abuse. There's also the matter of reducing the cost of capturing CO
2
. Even if Climeworks improves the efficiency of its system to spend $100 for every metric ton of CO
2
it removes, you're still looking at hundreds of billions of dollars (if not over a trillion) spent every year to achieve the scale needed to make a difference. That will require countries to not only respect climate science, but care about it enough to spend significant chunks of their budgets on capture technology.

The world’s first “negative emissions” plant has begun operation—turning carbon dioxide into stone Akshat Rathi; Quartz; 12 Oct 2017

Discusses need for CCS, Climeworks operation in Iceland, and elsewhere

Climeworks Starts Paid Carbon Dioxide Removal Frugal Moogal; Clean Technica; 17 Jun 2019

Switzerland-based Climeworks is now allowing anyone in the world the opportunity to turn their travel emissions into stone.

The solution that Climeworks has created works to address the three issues with carbon capture and sequestration all at the same time — by building smaller capture plants in locations that have both a power source and either a use for the carbon or the ability to immediately sequester it, Climeworks has created what they believe is a super climate-efficient process that captures more than 90% of the CO
2
from air and permanently sequesters it underground … even including the footprint for the manufacture of the material to make their scrubbers.

Climeworks believes that they can do this at a large scale at a competitive cost — currently, their cost is about $600 per ton, but they expect that to drop to $200 in the next three or four years, and hit a long term goal of less than $100 per ton in the next decade. Their goal is to capture 1% of the world’s emissions by 2025, an extremely ambitious timeline.

To do that, they need markets for their product. To that point, Climeworks announced a partnership with Coca-Cola HBC to use Climeworks-captured carbon in Coke’s carbonated drinks, starting with Valser sparking water. While Coca Cola uses a small amount of CO
2
every year — an estimate by Dr. Roy Spencer for this article from CNSNews in 2008 placed it at 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide a day worldwide — last summer Coke experienced a shortage of CO
2
in Europe.

Turns out the food and beverage industry really relies on CO
2
, with over 10 million tons being used in the industry worldwide. With Climeworks, companies could have their own, potentially in-house carbon production plants, eliminating future CO
2
shortage concerns.

Additionally, Climeworks has projects in the works to use their captured CO
2
in greenhouses and in renewable methane, pushing efforts to use (or perhaps we should say, re-use) captured CO
2
for industrial uses.

Which brings us to today — Climeworks now offers the opportunity to sequester part or all of your emissions! They have three options, 85kg per year for $96, 255kg per year for $288, or 600kg per year at $660.The carbon capture plants are running at a geothermal power plant in Iceland and sequestering the carbon underground into basaltic rock, turning it into stone within a few years.

While this is expensive — the math works out to $1,100 per metric ton of carbon removed — I signed up for the 85kg rate.

There are cheaper methods out there, (CoolEffect is one I’d suggest checking out), but I’m hoping that with some more support, Climeworks and direct air carbon capture can help.

Antarctic

A modest proposal for sequestration of CO
2
in the Antarctic
by Judith Curry in Climate Etc on 24 Aug 2012 [article]

CO
2
Snow Deposition in Antarctica to Curtail Anthropogenic Global Warming
by Ernest Agee, Andrea Orton, John Rogers in Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology on 25 Feb 2013 [article] | [full text] (paywalled) | [manuscript] (accessible)

A scientific plan is presented that proposes the construction of carbon dioxide (CO
2
) deposition plants in the Antarctic for removing CO
2
gas from Earth’s atmosphere. The Antarctic continent offers the best environment on Earth for CO
2
deposition at 1 bar of pressure and temperatures closest to that required for terrestrial air CO
2
“snow” deposition—133 K. This plan consists of several components, including

  1. ) air chemistry and CO
    2
    snow deposition,
  2. ) the deposition plant and a closed-loop liquid nitrogen refrigeration cycle,
  3. ) the mass storage landfill,
  4. ) power plant requirements,
  5. ) prevention of dry ice sublimation, and
  6. ) disposal (or use) of thermal waste.

Calculations demonstrate that this project is worthy of consideration, whereby 446 deposition plants supported by sixteen 1200-MW wind farms can remove 1 billion tons (1012 kg) of carbon (1 GtC) annually (a reduction of 0.5 ppmv), which can be stored in an equivalent “landfill” volume of 2 km × 2 km × 160 m (insulated to prevent dry ice sublimation). The individual deposition plant, with a 100 m × 100 m × 100 m refrigeration chamber, would produce approximately 0.4 m of CO
2
snow per day. The solid CO
2
would be excavated into a 380 m × 380 m × 10 m insulated landfill, which would allow 1 yr of storage amounting to 2.24 × 10−3 GtC. Demonstrated success of a prototype system in the Antarctic would be followed by a complete installation of all 446 plants for CO
2
snow deposition and storage (amounting to 1 billion tons annually), with wind farms positioned in favorable coastal regions with katabatic wind currents.

Algal

The revolutionary technology pushing Sweden toward the seemingly impossible goal of zero emissions Akshat Rathi; Quartz; 21 Jun 2017

Using algae to capture CO
2
emissions from Heidelberg Cement Degerhamn factory etc




  1. CCS presentation by Suzie Ferguson
  2. Although enhanced oil recovery is associated with CO
    2
    emissions from the fossil fuels so recovered (if they are burned without CCS), the CO
    2
    used for recovery is deposited in the reservoirs.