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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

[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: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: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?