Around the world, scientists are looking for ways to capture and store the CO2 generated from large power stations and industrial plants. Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is the enabling principle behind “Clean Coal”, a technology that is currently more theoretical than practical.
From a technical standpoint, there are many ways to capture and store carbon emissions. What stands in the way of widespread adoption of CCS techniques is efficiency and economics. It simply doesn’t pay to capture and store CO2 if it uses up too much energy and costs too much money.
One approach to CCS is to compress and refrigerate captured CO2, whereupon it turns into a liquid that can be drawn off and transported in tanker trucks or ships to storage locations. There are many strategic advantages to this technique, but it has long been thought to be too energy-intensive and expensive to be practical.
Recently, scientists at SINTEF – Scandinavia’s largest independent research organization – have performed detailed calculations that indicate that the cold storage technique may actually be cheaper and less energy-intensive than other capture methods.
There are many potential applications for this approach if it turns out to work as well as expected. For example, the most economical and widely used method for producing hydrogen – which could be the automobile fuel of the future – is to reform it from natural gas. The problem is that the process produces CO2.
The cold capture technique could enable the truly green conversion of plentiful natural gas to power hydrogen cars.
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A Cold Short-cut to CO2 Energy Storage
Photo, posted November 22, 2008, courtesy of Dmytrok via Flickr.
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Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.