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Cheaper Ways to Capture Carbon Dioxide [View all]
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/515881/cheaper-ways-to-capture-carbon-dioxide/[font face=Serif][font size=5]Cheaper Ways to Capture Carbon Dioxide[/font]
[font size=4] Techniques developed at MIT and Pacific Northwest National Lab could make it more affordable to burn fossil fuels without releasing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.[/font]
By Kevin Bullis on June 12, 2013
[font size=3]Capturing carbon dioxide from smokestacks and then storing it underground could make it possible to continue using fossil fuels without making such a large contribution to global warming. But the current method of capturing the carbon dioxide requires a lot of energy—it can lower the output of a power plant by a third and nearly double the cost of electricity.
Two novel approaches—one developed at MIT and the other at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory—could lower these costs by up to half. Both provide a low-energy way to trigger the material that captures the carbon dioxide to release the gas so that it can be stored. Then the material can be reused. The MIT process uses electrochemical reactions, instead of the steam used now, to trigger the carbon dioxide release. The other uses a solvent that can be triggered to release carbon dioxide by mixing in certain chemicals. Papers describing the approaches have just been posted online by the journal Energy and Environmental Science.
Existing carbon capture technology has not been widely deployed because it is expensive (see “Grasping for Ways to Capture Carbon Dioxide on the Cheap” and “Will Carbon Capture Be Ready on Time?”). In the conventional approach, the gases in power plant exhaust are separated using a solution containing amines that selectively bind carbon dioxide. The amines will release the carbon dioxide if they’re heated up, but this requires a large amount of energy, which would come from steam that could otherwise be used to generate power.
Researchers at MIT developed a way to get the amine solution to release carbon dioxide without heating it. They run it through a device that resembles a battery—it contains positive and negative electrodes made of copper. But instead of producing power, it uses electricity to regenerate amines (see “Fuel Cells Could Offer Cheap Carbon Dioxide Storage”).
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[font size=4] Techniques developed at MIT and Pacific Northwest National Lab could make it more affordable to burn fossil fuels without releasing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.[/font]
By Kevin Bullis on June 12, 2013
[font size=3]Capturing carbon dioxide from smokestacks and then storing it underground could make it possible to continue using fossil fuels without making such a large contribution to global warming. But the current method of capturing the carbon dioxide requires a lot of energy—it can lower the output of a power plant by a third and nearly double the cost of electricity.
Two novel approaches—one developed at MIT and the other at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory—could lower these costs by up to half. Both provide a low-energy way to trigger the material that captures the carbon dioxide to release the gas so that it can be stored. Then the material can be reused. The MIT process uses electrochemical reactions, instead of the steam used now, to trigger the carbon dioxide release. The other uses a solvent that can be triggered to release carbon dioxide by mixing in certain chemicals. Papers describing the approaches have just been posted online by the journal Energy and Environmental Science.
Existing carbon capture technology has not been widely deployed because it is expensive (see “Grasping for Ways to Capture Carbon Dioxide on the Cheap” and “Will Carbon Capture Be Ready on Time?”). In the conventional approach, the gases in power plant exhaust are separated using a solution containing amines that selectively bind carbon dioxide. The amines will release the carbon dioxide if they’re heated up, but this requires a large amount of energy, which would come from steam that could otherwise be used to generate power.
Researchers at MIT developed a way to get the amine solution to release carbon dioxide without heating it. They run it through a device that resembles a battery—it contains positive and negative electrodes made of copper. But instead of producing power, it uses electricity to regenerate amines (see “Fuel Cells Could Offer Cheap Carbon Dioxide Storage”).
…[/font][/font]
14 replies
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