Carbon Capture Breakthrough? Just might be!

Carbon Capture, more specifically CO2 capture, at coal fired power plants has the appeal of reducing CO2 emissions while still enabling us to use our most abundant fossil fuel resource, coal. However, capturing CO2 from current power plant flue gas is very costly because it is so diluted with nitrogen.

The potential CCS breakthrough involves oxidizing coal to release its stored energy using other sources of oxygen than air, so the dilution-with-nitrogen problem is eliminated. Other sources of oxygen can be iron oxide, or water.

Pulverized coal, mixed with iron oxide and heated to 1,650 deg F will react to form mostly CO2 and iron. The CO2 is very pure, approximately 99.5% after any water vapor has been condensed out, and thus the CO2 is ready for sequestration. The iron is then burned back to iron oxide using air as a source of oxygen, and it releases the energy originally from the coal to create steam and run a generator. The iron oxide thus formed is then recycled or "looped" back in the process.

Ohio State is the pioneer in this technology, known as Coal-Direct Chemical Looping (CDCL). The option using oxygen from water is known as Syngas Chemical Looping (SCL). Both are described in Midwest Energy News.

My view? I am optimistic! It is very revolutionary technology for power production, but it is very well known technology. The World's coal resources are vast, so where solar and wind generating potential are limited, it could become a valuable resource to help save our Earth, more or less as we know it, for future generations.

Retreating Glaciers

Following is a link to a short portion of the movie "Chasing Ice". I have seen the entire movie, and whether you have or haven't, I still encourage you to watch this short LINK.

Plants as Temperature Sensors

Okay, thermometers as sensors of global temperature have many deficiencies. They are not deployed widely enough to adequately average in regional variations, such as over the oceans (70% of the Earth's surface area). They also have a questionable input relative to "large city heat effects".

So what could be better? Well, if you have been following this blog, you know I favor sea level rise sensors. As the Earth warms, land based ice melts and sea levels rise. And yes, sea levels are rising. For all my sea level blog posts, or for just NOAA Data (and scroll down to sea level data).

BUT on to plants, millions and millions of them, all across the sparsely inhabited high latitudes of our northern hemisphere. How are they doing? In a nutshell, they are mostly prospering through warmer temperatures, and more rain fall. Just take a look at this latest NASA release.

Now for a NY Times blog post by Andrew Revkin, a concerned climate news reporter whom I admire a great deal. I would say he takes a more optimistic approach to the new NASA study by looking at plants adapting...and I hope he is right.

CCS - Carbon Capture and Sequestration

No, this is not about the current US Government spending sequestration program (which is explained HERE).

It is about capturing CO2 and storing it away somewhere, for a VERY long period of time. Coal fired power plants are the first obvious targets. Their flue gas is primarily nitrogen, water vapor, and large amounts of CO2. So the CO2 is far more concentrated than after the flue gas mixes with the atmosphere. Thermodynamics defines the energy required to "capture" CO2, either from flue gas or from the atmosphere. As you might expect, the theoretical energy (read cost) required is less for capturing CO2 from flue gas, where it is concentrated, compared to capturing it from the atmosphere, where it is very dilute.

Want to investigate further? Read Cory Simon's blog post on Scientific American. From that post we find that: "Capture technologies at present are estimated to cost 25-30% of a plant’s power output, driving up the price of electricity by around 80%........  the minimum theoretical energy.......  turns out to be ~5% of the output of the coal power plant, suggesting that there is room for improvement in current carbon capture technologies."

In Canada, how are things going to keep the politics of shale oil on a better environmental footing? Not so good relative to Canada's CCS plans, which have been very aggressive up to recently.

There are still many high level research programs going on, so maybe a breakthrough is possible to get us much nearer to the %5 of output theoretical limit. For instance, some novel organic-inorganic CO2 sponges.