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

[Anonymous Coward]

"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?"

People are ignoring the obvious here.
Mix CO2 with Water, add some flavorings and a heap of Sugar, probably Corn-Derived, and launch it into Space.
Who will be the first to market this to Alpha Centauri, Coca Cola or Pepsi?

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

[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:Hmmmmmmm

[AmiMoJo]

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.

You misunderstand. The point is to find a use for large amounts of CO2 that doesn't involve releasing it into the atmosphere (to meet the zero emission goal). If you use it in a non-airtight greenhouse I'm sure it will help the plants, but it will also leak out into the atmosphere and contribute to climate change.

So my point was that rather than using it to grow more of what we already have enough of at the expense of creating some emissions, or building an airtight greenhouse, we should do something else.

Re:Hmmmmmmm

[drinkypoo]

The point is to find a use for large amounts of CO2 that doesn't involve releasing it into the atmosphere (to meet the zero emission goal). If you use it in a non-airtight greenhouse I'm sure it will help the plants, but it will also leak out into the atmosphere and contribute to climate change.

It's going to do that anyway. Not all the CO2 will be used. Instead of figuring out ways to capture CO2 while burning fuel, we need to be finding ways to capture CO2 while making fuel, instead of releasing trapped carbon. Then it doesn't matter if we release the carbon when we burn it. With carbon-neutral fuels, we could all but ignore the CO2 emissions, and focus on HC, NOx, SOx, and PPM which are plenty to deal with — and all more immediately life-threatening than CO2. I like to bang on about Butanol and Green Diesel because they will work with our existing vehicles and we could have them now if not for government interference, but there are of course other solutions.

On this subject, what's driving me nuts right now is that Toyota is building a Class 8 truck which runs on hydrogen... and they're planning to use it for port drayage, where batteries work great. Who gives a shit if you have to lug around heavy batteries, you have a lot of time where you're just sitting around because it's a port and ports are usually grossly inefficient. But hydrogen is grossly inefficient, too. They added an inefficiency for no reason whatsoever! The only reason to use hydrogen in heavy trucks is if you're going farther than is practical for batteries.

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: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

[Subm]

What about the remaining 9.9 or so Gigatonnes?

Even if plants in greenhouses converted all the CO2 into themselves, the total used is nowhere close to the order of gigatons. Meanwhile, a lot of the CO2 will have escaped into the atmosphere, which undoes the benefit.

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:Hmmmmmmm

[MightyMartian]

It's pretty well understood. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere means more energy is trapped in the lower atmosphere and on the surface. In general terms, that means heat, though it also means more energetic storm systems and other atmospheric phenomena as well.

It's been known for over a century what happens if you increase CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. For anyone to act like somehow it's all still a mystery is to basically ignore the actual, real, verified physical properties of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses.

Re:Hmmmmmmm

[pipingguy]

"If you use it in a non-airtight greenhouse I'm sure it will help the plants, but it will also leak out into the atmosphere and contribute to climate change."

Do you understand the truly small concentrations of CO2 we're talking about here (as used in greenhouses)?

I swear... due to the relentless hysterical propaganda about climate change some people's brains have fallen out. Or it's all politics; a molecule used as a stick to beat your opponents with.

But hey, I used to work for a company that recovered, processed, stored and sold carbon dioxide - so I'm obviously biased, not to be trusted and quite probably evil.

Re:Hmmmmmmm

[Thruen]

Sounds like your brain fell out. We're talking about things to do with massive amounts of CO2, not complaining about the tiny amounts you already use. The post you replied to very clearly states that. Greenhouses would not be very effective for that. I think you agree, you're just too stupid to realize it.

Re: Hmmmmmmm

[Michael Woodhams]

If you are pumping it into an underground reservoir that used to hold natural gas, then you already know the reservoir can hold gas for geological time periods. (Or at least it could until someone drilled into it.)

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

[angel'o'sphere]

Yes, a single O2 molecule per CO2 molecule.
As we are measuring CO2 concentration in parts per million (PPM) in relation to other molecules in the atmosphere, you probably can imagine how meaningless small that increased O2 out put is.

Re:Hmmmmmmm

[Ogive17]

I'm in Ohio, each spring I see more and more fields switch over to more sustainable practices such as no till and better crop rotations.

Re:Hmmmmmmm

[careysub]

The Green Revolution actually started in the United States in 1938. That was the time and place that agricultural productivity abruptly shifted from an annual productivity growth of near zero (less than 0.1%) which stretched back hundreds of years, to about 1.5% every year. Here is an illustration of the phenomenon. This USDA chart starts in 1948, setting everything equal to "1", but the trend goes back to 1938. After WWII this trend spread from the U.S. to the entire world, and has (so far) tripled agricultural productivity. The overall trend shows no sign of slowing down yet. This growth rate is actually a bit higher than the economic growth rate introduced by the Industrial Revolution.

The revolution appears to be the synergistic effect of all science-based inputs into agriculture: evidence based practices, scientific breeding, use of fertilizers, pesticides (selectively), etc. The actual level of inputs into agriculture have been essentially flat for half a century, so the growth in the use of fertilizers and pesticides led the way early on, but are no longer a factor, superior practices and breeding now dominate.

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

[drinkypoo]

If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things

I'm not against tractors, where they're useful and/or necessary. For initial clearing and tilth they are highly useful. Overuse of any good thing, however, can turn into a bad one.

I'm also not against fertilizer, but we don't need to make it out of oil. We already make all we need, and then we throw most of it away. I am, of course talking mostly about feces (both human and nonhuman) but also about compost. In places with severe landfill problems this is already typically separated. As well, in places with significant sewage problems, sludge is being processed sufficiently that it can be used for crop production, so things are moving in the right direction. We're even starting to see some of the methane processed for energy, which reduces the GHG impact almost no matter what you do with it, whether you burn it in an ICE or feed it into a fuel cell.

I'm not even against irrigation canals, but I am against letting farmers who don't use their water allotment pump the excess into trucks and sell it to people in the next county. I'm against forcing them to do it by not permitting them to use the water next year if they don't use it this year as well, but I can be against both things at once.

You can be for producing food and still be against doing stupid things.

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.

Re:Hmmmmmmm

[mrchaotica]

Hey dipshit, you're so ignorant you've got your "wealth transfer" argument backwards.

In reality, the only inequitable transfer of wealth comes from the fact that polluters are free-riders, able to inflict expensive damage on everyone else with impunity.

They have no right to fuck up everyone else's air, and it is exactly the 100% correct "free market" solution to make them pay for it!

Every free-market libertarian should support abolishing the SUBSIDY on pollution.

Better title

[DrYak]

A better title would have been :
Scientists Develop Technology to Recapture CO2 Produced by Burning Natural Gas.

Re:Better title

[AmiMoJo]

A better way of phrasing the question would be:

"So when we apply this process to recapture the CO2 and send it down deep wells, what happens to the externalized cost of releasing it into the atmosphere?"

And the answer is:

"The people creating that cost get to pay it for a change."

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:Better title

[AmiMoJo]

That's what the government is for. As a whole we know we need to do something about climate change. Individually we are unwilling to pay for it. The best solution humanity has come up with so far is for our collective will, through democratic government, to force it to be paid for.

Doing it that way has the additional benefit of spreading the cost more fairly and making that cost lower than if individuals had to pay it.

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.

Re:Misleading title

[dbIII]

Here's one temporary sequestration example:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/201...

Underground

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:

"“The large-scale underground storage of CO2 in former natural gas reservoirs could be very significant in the future,” believes Stefan Penthor. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also sees underground CO2 storage as an essential component of any future climate policy. However, CO2 can only be stored if it has been separated as pure as possible – just as it is with the new CLC combustion method."

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

[kanweg]

If you filter CO2 from regular combustion gas, it is highly diluted by the nitrogen being present. So, the flow rate is higher (or you need a bigger bed). I think the new way of operating is rather smart. You don't care too much how much oxygen happens to slip through the particles in the other stream. A further advantage is that this process can run without nitrogen oxides forming. Which is quite nice too.

A possible advantage may be that higher combustion temperatures might be achievable (depends on how much energy is required to extract the oxygen from the particles.

Bert

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

[Rei]

All very good points. And the possibility of higher temperature combustion didn't occur to me, but that may well be possible - you get higher adiabatic flame temperatures in pure oxygen combustion. If the oxygen absorber isn't very costly, the higher Carnot efficiency could potentially pay for the cost.

Another interesting possibility that now occurs to me is high pressure combustion (also greater efficiency). The oxygen-rich absorber is almost certainly going to be dramatically more oxygen-dense than even compressed air feedstocks. You could have some crazy-intense combustion out of that. You're basically looking at something like the thermite reaction. In the thermite case, you have iron holding onto oxygen relatively weakly reacting with aluminum which forms a high energy bond with oxygen. Aluminum burns poorly in air because the oxygen is so sparse, but when it has such a concentrated oxygen source (the iron oxide), it burns extremely aggressively. I could easily envision the same sort of situation here - just methanothermic reduction rather than aluminothermic.

Wow, just thought of another thing: combustion doesn't have to occur at the same time as oxygen collection. So for a peaking plant you could dramatically downsize the intake section and scrubbing bed, so long as the oxygen absorber isn't too expensive (which it probably isn't - most common metal oxides are dirt cheap). It stocks up on its oxidized material when demand is low, but when demand is high it burns through it like crazy. And on top of that, burning feeding in your oxidizer as a solid means a physically small footprint on the combustion side. So overall the plant is scaled down.

You know, the more I think about this, the more interesting it sounds.

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. :)

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.

Re: We had 12 times more CO2 in THE FUCKING ICE AG

[cunina]

Another fun statistic: nearly 2% of climate scientists agree with you!

Re:The laws of physics say

[MightyYar]

Depends... you might be pumping shit down into the ground anyway to displace oil. Might as well use the captured CO2 - that would significantly lower the marginal "storage" cost.

Re:Good, but leaves us wih other big problem

[Immerman]

To put (very rough) numbers on the difference mentioned by AC - the CO2 released from burning fossil fuels to produce 1W of heat will capture an average of around 1,000,000W of solar energy before it leaves the atmosphere. Get rid of the CO2, and global warming goes away.

Re:We had 12 times more CO2 in THE FUCKING ICE AGE

[tbannist]

I don't know why these global warming idiots just don't do their own research before opening their mouths.

Did you ever think that maybe we did?

Re:We had 12 times more CO2 in THE FUCKING ICE AGE

[Altrag]

Here's a fun experiment to show you why your argument is dumb:

1) Find a brick wall.
2) Slowly walk into it.
3) Now try running into it headlong.

You see how #2 was fine while #3 gave you brain damage? Yeah that's pretty much the same difference between historic carbon highs and today. Historically, it took hundreds of thousands of years to switch between carbon highs and carbon lows (and similar for temperatures, though carbon isn't the only factor there so the two aren't always 100% in sync.)

This time, instead of hundreds of thousands of years we're doing it in hundreds of years. That would be the equivalent of, instead of running at the wall for #3 you strap yourself to a rocket and fire yourself at the wall. You're well beyond brain damage and into the realm of vaporization at that point. That's basically what we're doing to our planet. But with carbon instead of bricks.