Scientists Develop Technology That Burns Natural Gas With No CO2 Emissions (scienceblog.com)

New submitter Ben Sullivan writes: Researchers and engineers in Vienna have developed a way to burn natural gas without releasing CO2 into the air through a combustion method called chemical looping combustion (CLC). In this process, CO2 can be isolated during combustion without having to use any additional energy, which means it can then go on to be stored. The method had already been applied successfully in a test environment, and has now been upscaled to allow use in up to a 10 MW facility. ScienceBlog.com reports: "A granulate made of metal oxide circulates between the two chambers and is responsible for transporting oxygen from air to fuel: 'We pump air through one chamber, where the particles take up oxygen. They then move on to the second chamber, which has natural gas flowing through it. Here is where the oxygen is released, and then where flameless combustion takes place, producing CO2 and water vapor,' explains Stefan Penthor from the Institute of Chemical Engineering at TU Wien. The separation into two chambers means there are two separate flue gas streams to deal with too: air with a reduced concentration of oxygen is discharged from one chamber, water vapor and CO2 from the other. The water vapor can be separated quite easily, leaving almost pure CO2, which can be stored or used in other technical applications."

Comments

Hmmmmmmm

[Archtech]

"The water vapor can be separated quite easily, leaving almost pure CO2, which can be stored or used in other technical applications."

Hmmmm, quite a lot of CO2. Probably more than needed for "other technical applications" - besides which, what will be done with it after those "applications" are complete?

Anyone need 10 Gigatonnes of CO2? How many big tanks would it take to store? Or will it be cleverly stored underground, somewhere we can be absolutely sure it will never suddenly re-emerge into the atmosphere?

Re:Hmmmmmmm

[balaband]

Actually, there is a nice place where you can use all of this CO2 - make the richer mixture of CO2/Air and use it in greenhouses. If I remember my high-school biology correctly, more CO2 in air (up to 0.07%) would make plants have better photosynthesis process and much higher yield.

Re:Hmmmmmmm

[umafuckit]

Actually, there is a nice place where you can use all of this CO2 - make the richer mixture of CO2/Air and use it in greenhouses.

Isn't that what we're doing right now?

Re:Hmmmmmmm

[AmiMoJo]

Only problem is that you need an airtight greenhouse, complete with airlocks. Compared to modern greenhouses made out of plastic, it is unlikely to be economical.

The thing is, we actually don't have a problem growing enough food. Modern farming is already more than efficient enough. What we need is to make it more sustainable.

Re:Hmmmmmmm

[MightyYar]

The problem is having the will to feed them.

Yes, well, it's a bit more complicated than that... let's say the US had the "will" to feed all of the world's hungry. Some (most?) of the world's "hunger" problems are actually political problems. Without threat of force, these political problems aren't going away. So really it comes down to a willingness to toss aside the old notions of sovereignty and actively intervene where help is needed, no matter whose jurisdiction. So yeah, you could feed the starving North Koreans, but you risk killing most of Seoul's population for that endgame.

Re:Hmmmmmmm

[fred6666]

"Wealth transfer is a facet of civilization, and has been since the beginning. You act as if it's a bad thing."

Crippling the economies of Western nations to make the Chinese rich is certainly a bad thing if you happen to be poor and living in the West.

Why do you hate poor people?

Either you are racist (against the Chinese) or just don't get it.
There are more poor people in China and they are poorer than those in the West.

Wealth transfer from the polluters to those who suffer from pollution, is fair. Poor people tend to pollute much less than rich people, by the way. Smaller cars, smaller houses, less air travel.

The US just has to reduce its CO2 emissions by something like 90% and then you could complain and start asking China for money. Until then... shut up.

Re:Hmmmmmmm

[sbaker]

It is a fundamental flaw in the capitalist system that you have to pay for raw materials, pay for labor, pay for R&D, pay for marketting, pay for the land your business occupies - but disposing of the waste that you generate is a freebie.

This biases things in favor of businesses that generate waste compared to businesses that either don't generate waste - or pay to clean it up.

Which explains why we're trashing the planet so efficiently.

The only way to make capitalism sustainable and fair is to make the cost of disposing of waste become a part of the cost of producing the product.

High waste products would then cost more - fewer people would buy them - and if they did, the cost of cleanup would be included, so no big deal.

Making this a "tax" only works if the organization that collects the tax spends it on doing the cleanup...but that's probably not gonna happen. Instead the tax is seen as a punishment for dirty businesses - and that's not something that's really popular.

An alternative would be to have the polluters be required to do the cleanup. This is more direct than taxation - and fairer - and it removes "the middle man" - which is also good.

In pure abstract capitalism theory - we might argue that if people wanted a clean environment, that they'd simply boycott products from businesses that didn't give them what they need. But we have a "Crisis of the Commons" situation here. For each individual person, their benefit from cheaper/dirtier products exceeds their perceived loss...and that would be a problem if the vast majority of people didn't do that. But they do - it's human nature.

But however you slice it - capitalism is broken and we need to fix it somehow. No matter what, government has to be involved because "market forces" are failing miserably.

So a "carbon tax" would work - or a law that said "You make the pollution - you fix it!" would work. The former can be graduated and controlled more easily than the latter - especially for things like carbon emissions that really cannot be fixed. The latter would prevent things like plastic waste in the oceans from being a problem more effectively than a "plastics tax" and a proliferation of other taxes.

The German "green dot" program is a good example of the "you did it - you fix it" approach. Products labelled like that REQUIRE the manufacturer to provide recycling processes to de-manufacture these products...either themselves - or by paying a contribution to centralised recycling plants in proportion to the cost of recycling their products.

However, for other businesses - a carbon tax would also work.

Re:Hmmmmmmm

[MightyMartian]

The problem with "you break it, you fix it" is that companies caught heavily polluting tend to have this habit of going bankrupt, in which case the taxpayer is still on the hook. A carbon tax, as far as GHG emissions goes, is applied universally, and thus no one can "skip out" on the damages.

The big debate to my mind is how the tax is ultimately used. Some have a significant issue with it simply going into a jurisdiction's general revenue account. But that's a side issue, the point is to price carbon to reflect the damage it does. Whether governments use that money to fund other programs, hand it back as some sort of rebate, or use it to fund renewables is a political question.

Misleading title

[CustomSolvers2]

A better version would have been: "Scientists Develop Technology That Allows To Easily Separate CO2 Emissions When Burning Natural Gas", by paying special attention at words like almost in their "the water vapor can be separated quite easily, leaving almost pure CO2" description.

They aren't even removing the CO2, but storing it somewhere else. So, this approach delivers something similar to what the existing CO2-capture techniques already do.

Clarification: I am not particularly interested in participating in discussions about this orrelated issues. The main motivation for this post is to somehow complement my previous ones in another article.

Problem is the amount of farmland you'd need.

[robbak]

Look at it this way - If you grow plants to absorb all the CO2 a power plant produces, you would be growing enough plant matter to run the plant on the biomas. That's going to be a lot of farms under plastic.

Re:In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

ACTUALLY they found an easy way to separate pure oxygen from air and then transport it to methane burning chamber. If they had access to cheap pure oxygen in tanks, this method would be the same. The problem before this was how to split CO2 from all the nitrogen in standard air.