Researchers at MIT have come up with an approach to “scrubbing” the carbon dioxide from power plant emissions that they say is more efficient than existing approaches and easier to retrofit:
Now, researchers at MIT have come up with a scrubbing system that requires no steam connection, can operate at lower temperatures, and would essentially be a “plug-and-play†solution that could be added relatively easily to any existing power plant.
The new electrochemical system is described in a paper just published online in the journal Energy and Environmental Science, and written by doctoral student Michael Stern, chemical engineering professor T. Alan Hatton and two others.
The system is a variation on a well-studied technology that uses chemical compounds called amines, which bind with CO2 in the plant’s emission stream and can then release the gas when heated in a separate chamber. But the conventional process requires that almost half of the power plant’s low-pressure steam be diverted to provide the heat needed to force the amines to release the gas. That massive diversion would require such extensive changes to existing power plants that it is not considered economically feasible as a retrofit.
In the new system, an electrochemical process replaces the steam-based separation of amines and CO2. This system only requires electricity, so it can easily be added to an existing plant.
The new approach could also be used to reduce the emissions from steel or aluminum plants. Although it’s not mentioned in the article, I wonder if this approach would be effective in dealing with the emissions from cement plants. After power production and transportation, cement production is the biggest producer of greenhouse gases.
The United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal, the country with the largest proven reserves. Finding ways to exploit the U. S.’s vast coal reserves that are ecologically sound is very much in the U. S.’s interests and a much better strategy than the “war on coal” the Obama Administration is embarked on.
Increasing U. S. manufacturing is inextricably linked with making more, cheaper energy here and, frankly, in most of the country that will mean coal or natural gas for the foreseeable future (except here in Chicago where more than 80% of our energy is derived from nuclear). Alternative energy sources might be useful for heating and lighting but not for the high energy intensity needed for manufacturing.
More energy means more manufacturing. More manufacturing means more jobs, even if they’re not in the numbers and types of manufacturing in the middle of the last century. Although I strongly suspect that robotics is the future of coal mining, more mining means more jobs. Rather than fighting strategies for making coal more ecologically sound we should be embracing them.
Where does the released CO2 gas go?