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

Re:Better title

[mpercy]

This is what researchers from the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) and the Associated Press—NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago set out to better understand. Their nationally representative poll found that 43% of Americans were unwilling to pay an additional $1 per month in their electricity bill to combat climate change—and a large majority were unwilling to pay $10 per month. That’s despite the fact that a whopping 77% said they think climate change is happening and 65% think it is a problem the government should do something about. Support plummets as the amount of the fee increases.’

This is an upside-down result. The best available science tells us that Americans should be willing to pay considerably more, because the damages from climate change are so great—including to them personally. If we use the federal government’s estimate of the combined social cost of carbon pollution and apply it to the typical U.S. household’s electricity consumption on today’s national grid mix, the average household faces damages of almost $20 per month. Yet just 29% of respondents said they would be willing to pay at least that much.

https://blogs.wsj.com/experts/...

Re:Hmmmmmmm

[drinkypoo]

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.

No, no you do not. I don't know who told you that, but they were full of shit, and I cannot understand why you are repeating it. There are people all over the place doing CO2 enrichment without airtight grow spaces, and it works. The down side is that humans shouldn't be in the room while it is active. Elevated CO2 levels affect mood and health. They are actively bad for you.

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.

This part is true. There's more than enough food for everyone to eat. The problem isn't there being enough food. The problem is having the will to feed them.

Re:Problem is the amount of farmland you'd need.

[Rei]

Assuming that your plan is to grow greenhouse biomass to burn for power. Which would be a pretty weird plan.

CO2 has plenty of uses (a big one is in enhanced oil recovery), but yes, the amount produced in generating baseload power is far more than industry needs. That said, the objective is not to have CO2-intensive power as baseload - only peaking. With an ideal generation infrastructure (solar + wind, HVDC links connecting different regions), the amount of CO2 generated drops by 1-2 orders of magnitude. Which puts it more in the range of industrial needs.

Re:Hmmmmmmm

[drinkypoo]

That kind of happened in the 1960s and 1970s and was called "the green revolution".

The green revolution was a great handout to chemical companies but it is not clear that it actually reduced deaths by starvation, it only postponed them slightly. Meanwhile it is selling out our future by destroying topsoil upon which we depend for growing crops. It leads to a future in which all food is grown hydroponically in an inert dirt medium, which is basically the present for many crops — indeed, it is the current state of affairs for any field not fertilized with shit.

Using synthetic fertilizers and pesticides outright destroys beneficial organisms like nematodes in the soil which plants depend upon for health in various ways, and thus destroys topsoil. That is the legacy of your so-called "Green Revolution". Even if Borlaug's goal was laudable, the reality of the situation is the exact opposite. It is actually harming our long-term ability to produce food.

Re:Problem is the amount of farmland you'd need.

[Rei]

It's an interesting tech, but I'm not all that sanguine about it.

1) Presenting it as being some sort of lossless, no-downsides system isn't accurate. There's always going to be some losses when you add an extra chemical intermediary step in (in this case, a solid-state oxygen transfer mechanism).

2) It's not really all that fundamentally different from what's done to capture CO2 today. To capture CO2 you have the exhaust stream flow through a bed of CO2 absorbers, which you then reversibly degas. Here they're having the input air stream flow through a bed of O2 absorbers, which they reversibly degas for combustion. They've just moved it from the output side to the input side and switched absorbers. I can see some potential advantages to this (for example, the broader range of O2 absorbers; all other pollutants being captured with the CO2 rather than just a fraction of them; etc), but when it comes down to it, it doesn't look like some huge game changer.

Re:Hmmmmmmm

[MightyMartian]

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

And frankly, I think transferring some wealth from those that are profiting from CO2-emitting fuels to those who aren't is a good thing. Technology plays its part, but so long as we are subsidizing fossil fuels, either directly through tax incentives, or indirectly by doing nothing and thus handing it to future generations to pay the costs (and really, we are already paying the costs), looks to me exactly like transferring wealth from those least able to pay for it to those who actually are already making money hand over fist.

Fossil fuels are bad, and we need to abandon them. It's that simple. I think heavy regulation is a mistake. Heavy regulation is expensive and can be fairly unreliable. A flat-out carbon tax, that's what you need. If indeed market forces are the answer, and I believe they are, then slap a tax or tariff on carbon, which everyone that extracts or uses fossil fuels pay for; from the oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico right down to the guy gassing up his Honda.

Re:Problem is the amount of farmland you'd need.

[Rei]

Doing some math here... if we say that the absorbed oxygen is 20% of the absorber's mass, burned stoichiometrically with methane, at 50% efficiency due to high temperatures and pressures, then storing a day's worth at 1MW would require 62 tonnes of absorber. At iron oxide bulk costs and iron oxide densities, that'd be about $44k and 11 cubic meters, respectively. 1GW-day, $44m and 11000 cubic meters (say, a storage yard 50x50x4,4m). None of this seems at all unreasonable, given that a thermal plant usually runs about $1/W or more in capital costs; the absorber could be far more expensive and the storage time far more than a day's worth without being prohibitive.

Nifty. :)