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

[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

[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.

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.