Posted to News on 1st Apr 2012, 00:00
Any alternative to carbon capture and storage?
The government has revived the competition to develop carbon capture and storage (CSS) technology, promising £1bn of funds in a push to drive a solution forwards. The government's stated goal is to develop a world leading CSS industry, which could one day provide 100,000 or more UK jobs. Energy and climate change secretary Ed Davey predicted that a CSS industry could be worth £6.5bn to the UK economy by the end of the 2020s, by which time there could be 20GW to 30GW of power plants using the technology, the equivalent of 12 to 20 large power stations. But it is also reckoned that CSS technology will be essential if we are to meet our climate change targets.
>Hold on, though, you may be saying. This all sounds very familiar. Isn't there already a government funded CSS competition running. Actually, no. There was a CSS competition, but it was abandoned when all the entrants pulled out. After years getting the competition off the ground, it finally died last October when the last possible project was cancelled. Will it succeed this time? Well, certainly the money is a good incentive. But the problems are numerous, not least the costs and feasibility of actually storing the CO2 you capture. That set me to wondering, and while I wonder I often find myself chewing the end of my pencil. And it was this that led me to the revelation that carbon is actually pretty useful stuff. Perhaps our focus on CSS is wrong. Perhaps we should be focusing instead on what I have defined as CSU - carbon capture and usage.
>As you might expect, my first two thoughts were pencils and fizzy drinks. Clearly neither of these really addresses the problem. Producing graphite from CO2 is rather energy intensive, and think of all the trees we'd have to cut down to make the pencils. And even if the fizzy drinks industry could make use of all the CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels, we'd only end up burping it back into the atmosphere anyway. No net gains. But a little research was all it took to highlight some of the possibilities for my newly defined CSU strategy.
>This week it was reported that students at Michigan University have designed and constructed their own mini-smokestack to showcase a new method of scrubbing CO2 from emissions. It turns captured carbon into a sold material that could have applications in construction. Sounds promising. And last year, researchers from Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology began experimenting with a process that uses CO2 to process plastic products in an environmentally-friendly way. Further, in 2010, scientists created 'dry water', which has a powerful ability to soak up CO2. And numerous industrial applications have emerged where CO2 is chemically fixed and not emitted into the atmosphere. In addition, in 2007 researchers found a way to harness solar energy to convert CO2 into carbon monoxide, which can be used to make fuels. There is even the possibility of 'reverse combustion', where researchers have demonstrated what look to be viable processes to produce hydrocarbons from CO2. The more you look, the more projects you find.
>Of course, with all of these research projects, there is a long way to go before they become commercially viable processes. But are they really any less viable than the money and energy you'd have to expend to bury CO2 deep under ground or deep under water?
Mark Simms, 3 April 2012
