From James Hansen’s, Bill McKibben’s and Joe Romm’s worst nightmare department, comes this uplifting science story from the Ohio State University. Basically they found a way to oxidize coal and extract energy without releasing any CO2.
When a team of Ohio State students worked around the clock for nine days straight recently, they weren’t pulling the typical college “all-nighters.”
Instead, they were reaching a milestone in clean coal technology.
For 203 continuous hours, they operated a scaled-down version of a power plant combustion system with a unique experimental design–one that chemically converts coal to heat while capturing 99 percent of the carbon dioxide produced in the reaction.
This new technology, called coal-direct chemical looping, was pioneered by Liang-Shih Fan, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and director of Ohio State’s Clean Coal Research Laboratory. (Fan is a Distinguished University Professor and a 2012 Innovator of the Year.)
Typical coal-fired power plants burn coal to heat water to make steam, which turns the turbines that produce electricity. In chemical looping, the coal isn’t burned with fire, but instead chemically combusted in a sealed chamber so that it doesn’t pollute the air. A second combustion unit in the lab does the same thing with coal-derived syngas, and both produce 25 thermal kilowatts of energy.
“In the simplest sense, combustion is a chemical reaction that consumes oxygen and produces heat,” Fan says. “Unfortunately, it also produces carbon dioxide, which is difficult to capture and bad for the environment. So we found a way to release the heat without burning.”
Dawei Wang, a research associate and one of the group’s team leaders, says the technology’s potential benefits go beyond the environment: “The plant could really promote our energy independence. Not only can we use America’s natural resources such as Ohio coal, but we can keep our air clean and spur the economy with jobs.”
The researchers are about to take the technology to the next level: a pilot plant is under construction at the U.S. Department of Energy‘s National Carbon Capture Center. Set to begin operations in late 2013, that plant will produce 250 thermal kilowatts using syngas. Tests there will set the stage for future commercial development.
“At Ohio State, with a team of creative minds, we can take a technological concept closer to real commercial use,” Wang says.
The technology looks promising: as doctoral student Elena Chung explained, the 203-hour experiment could have continued even longer.
“We voluntarily chose to stop the unit. Honestly, it was a mutual decision by Dr. Fan and the students. It was a long and tiring week where we all shared shifts,” she says.
Fan’s students were thrilled to be involved in this breakthrough, even if they did lose some sleep.
“Ohio State has been very supportive of our research efforts,” Fan says. The result of the university’s backing? A place, he says, where “brilliant invention and cutting-edge research can be successful and progressive.”
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From: New Coal Technology Harnesses Energy Without Burning, Nears Pilot-Scale Development
“In the simplest sense, combustion is a chemical reaction that consumes oxygen and produces heat,” Fan said. “Unfortunately, it also produces carbon dioxide, which is difficult to capture and bad for the environment. So we found a way to release the heat without burning. We carefully control the chemical reaction so that the coal never burns—it is consumed chemically, and the carbon dioxide is entirely contained inside the reactor.”
Dawei Wang, a research associate and one of the group’s team leaders, described the technology’s potential benefits. “The commercial-scale CDCL plant could really promote our energy independence. Not only can we use America’s natural resources such as Ohio coal, but we can keep our air clean and spur the economy with jobs,” he said.
“We carefully control the chemical reaction so that the coal never burns—it is consumed chemically, and the carbon dioxide is entirely contained inside the reactor.” |
Though other laboratories around the world are trying to develop similar technology to directly convert coal to electricity, Fan’s lab is unique in the way it processes fossil fuels. The Ohio State group typically studies coal in the two forms that are already commonly available to the power industry: crushed coal “feedstock,” and coal-derived syngas.
The latter fuel has been successfully studied in a second sub-pilot research-scale unit, through a similar process called Syngas Chemical Looping (SCL). Both units are located in a building on Ohio State’s Columbus campus, and each is contained in a 25-foot-high insulated metal cylinder that resembles a very tall home water heater tank.
No other lab has continuously operated a coal-direct chemical looping unit as long as the Ohio State lab did last September. But as doctoral student Elena Chung explained, the experiment could have continued.
“We voluntarily chose to stop the unit. We actually could have run longer, but honestly, it was a mutual decision by Dr. Fan and the students. It was a long and tiring week where we all shared shifts,” she said.
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Joe Romm of course can’t yet bring himself to carry this story over at Climate Progress, but Fox News used an old quote from one of CP’s nuttiest professors, yes our old friend Donald Brown, who says:
“Claiming that coal is clean because it could be clean — if a new technically unproven and economically dubious technology might be adopted — is like someone claiming that belladonna is not poisonous because there is a new unproven safe pill under development,” wrote Donald Brown at liberal think tank Climate Progress.
Heh. Read more here: http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/02/20/coal-cleanest-energy-source-there-is/
Rational people would of course embrace such news positively. But of course, we aren’t dealing with rational people at Climate Progress, or at 350.org, so I don’t expect them or James Hansen to be happy about this development.
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CRS, Dr.P.H. says: wrote
February 20, 2013 at 8:35 pm
LoL. I recall reading about that process and wondering what had happened to it.
Didn’t I read that a new fracking fluid is liquified dry ice? (Not that “evil CO2 stuff”, just good old tree food)
I am with Alcheson: and regarding “This will make Solyndra look like an excellent bargain.”
I worked in the semiconductor industry while I was working in robotics automation and servomotion control systems. That’s when I saw Solyndra’s stupid solar tubes while at Semicon/Solar West in SF. I recall asking the engineer at the show to explain their great technology. He said, our tubes can lay flat and the sun shines on some portion of the tubes at all angles because the solar cells are located cylindrically around the inside of the tubes. I responded that therefore the sun never illuminates all of the solar cells ever –and probably never more than 30%. So the efficiency is never ever going to be any good. There will never be sun shining on more than a small fraction of the cells in these tubes. He said, “but, but, you don’t have to tilt these towards the sun and they are perfect for flat roofs. I left dumbfounded at the nonsense. This was an instant fail in my mind.
A few years later, I was instrumenting an industrial building in Fremont with sensors for an irrigation system to sense soil moisture content as feed back to watering optimization. While there, I saw huge numbers of these unsold tubes in their warehouse. The owner of the complex said they were being stored because Solyndra had nowhere to put them. A year later they were all ground down to dust and reclaimed as scrap. That’s where the tax money went… the rest lined pockets of Obama supporters at the expense of you and I.
End of story!
@JohnC says:
February 20, 2013 at 11:46 pm
Didn’t I read that a new fracking fluid is liquified dry ice? (Not that “evil CO2 stuff”, just good old tree food)
++++
You left out the note. dry ice is CO2…liquid or not. But you knew that I am sure 🙂
Hey, anti-federal paranoids! If you want to get exercised about a REAL scandal, look up energyfromthorium.com. No you wont be reading about conspiracies aimed at abolishing our freedoms. You’ll read about an elegant and proven technology that got muscled out of the funding that might have given us energy independence decades ago, The muscle that did it was that of the established nuclear industry and the pig headed behind-the-scenes roadblocks thrown up by 4 star admiral Rickover (“the Father of the Nuclear Navy”) and his handpicked director of Research and development (Milton Shaw) at AEC as well as Congressman Hollifield (It’s a LONG read but worth knowing about. Use keywords “Milton Shaw”, “Decline of The American Nuclear Establishment”). Dont neglect to read about thorium advocate, Dr Alvin Weinberg*, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratories (whose honors and accomplishments would humble all but a very few of the famous and not so famous. Rickover’s quick success with the light water reactor is owed to Weinberg’s recommending it after determining, as early 1946, the practicality of using pressurized water as both moderator AND coolant, ENRICHED uranium for the fuel and CADMIUM for fuel cladding.). If you want to condemn the Obama Administration concerning this issue, just be aware that “W’s” secretary of energy never acknowledged receipt of communications on the subject and candidate McCain became disinterested after losing in 08. And before you condemn Obama for his unfortunate choice for Energy Secretary Chu (of genuinely questionable loyalty), read up on the history of the Manhattan Project (in which Dr Weinberg participated) and learn how many times and ways that the M.P. nearly didnt happen -** (How DO you get through to the President or a convincible and influential staffer?)***
Sorry for rambling but this issue fills thousands of pages and hours of internet video. It’s hard to know where to start and when to stop.
* In the interests of full disclosure, it gives me much pleasure to report that Dr Weinberg authored “Global Effects Of Man’s Production Of Energy” in 1974. Yes, it was about climate change. And some of you might be disappointed to learn that Dr Edward Teller called attention to proliferating CO2 as a threat to future clinate.
**Every President has gate keepers who allow or disallow issues from reaching the busy man at the top. But for the energetic advocacy of an unlikely combination of such relatively unknown great men as Szilard, Wigner, Alexander Sachs, Oliphant, Peierls, Frisch, Compton, Vannevar Bush as well as world famous Einstein, FDR would never have gotten us to the Bomb which not only ended the War but probably prevented World War III.
***I cant resist bringing up W’s and Rice’s cavalier dismissal of pre 911 warnings. What if FDR had been a little more like W in that regard?
To Lazy T. Why not start your own blog? Let’s see if you can get anywhere near as succesful as Anthony is.
@Mario Lento says:
February 20, 2013 at 11:58 pm
I am with Alcheson: and regarding “This will make Solyndra look like an excellent bargain.”
>>>>>>>>>>>
Shouldn’t this story about Solyndra’s scam, stealing millions in tax-money as subsidies, storing their snake-oil in warehouses, then disposing of their snake-oil by grinding up everything for recycling, be front page news in all mainstream media? The big green scam is so widespread that even the lapdog media try to hide it, a scam which globally, adding up all the big green pseudo investments amounts to the greatest scam ever perpetrated on mankind.
Most likely won’t get anywhere, just like thermal depolymerization and Synrock. Synrock? Synthetic rock, invented as a material to mix with and permanently seal away radioactive waste. A small scale demonstration system was built in the 1980’s. The process involved mixing the waste with the Synrock powder, pouring it into a corrugated steel can and induction heating it. The red hot can was then smashed into a disk, compacting the Synrock and radioactive waste into a solid. Synrock samples showed only minor color changes, no cracks, chips or leaching under hot water and pressure tests that cracked and crumbled and caused leaching from borosilicate glass.
So you’d think the government agency tasked with securely disposing of radioactive waste would choose Synrock? NOPE! They went with the borosilicate glass encapsulation process.
S.L.B.T.M.
Mario Lento says:
February 21, 2013 at 12:00 am
@JohnC says:
February 20, 2013 at 11:46 pm
Didn’t I read that a new fracking fluid is liquified dry ice? (Not that “evil CO2 stuff”, just good old tree food)
CO2 doesn’t have a liquid phase at Earth atmospheric pressure. It goes directly from solid to gas. Above 5 atmospheres there is a liquid phase, but you are talking about several times that to get a liquid you can work with.
I very much doubt liquid CO2 is used in fracking, but the ignorance and gullibility of grant issuing bureaucrats knows no bounds.
Perhaps this technology could even be developed into small scale local or residential sized units, so the energy could be produced closer to the end user where it is needed rather than sent thousands of km on power lines where ~80% of the energy is lost in the wires. ?
Sounds good for heating the submarine with coal oven.
Modern science is bad for environment and psychical health.
Well the first responders to this post caught on fast and I agree with them all the way. This sounds like a solution looking for a problem and if other stuff from Ohio State are to go by complete rubbish.
Thanks for the explanation kadaka (KD Knoebel). But still by definition a sock puppet.
But back to the new technology, I supposed theorist of their exercise is burn coal in the absence of nitrogen, which iis in plentiful supply when burning coal with air. That means the gas you get consists predominantly of co2 and h2o. I can see this being very important if want to sequester the flue gases to keep it out of the atmosphere.
John m. I don’t for a minute believe your 80% figure is accurate. I accept that there is line loss but not that much.
So they are burning coal – the only difference is that they are burning it in a sealed container.
What is the point?
Pater George says “We still don’t have a major program to get good at sequestering CO2. Shame on us.”
Lately, I’m reading about capturing CO2 with algae, to produce a solid or slurry rather than a gas. Easier to handle, can sit at the surface without the need to dig a mine. Then, what to do with the algal mix? Well, why not burn it for fuel, thus bypassing the millions of years that Nature took to convert some such mixtures to coal?
Should pay well on carbon credits. Go for it, you carpetbaggers.
I really fail to see the point with this post. Why promote the false agenda of the so called green tech that tries to deprive nature of its most significant molecule, CO2? How is that good?
Sorry, so CO2 is still produced but they capture it? Why not just apply the same capturing technology to conventional power stations?
I can’t see what is new hear apart from chemical rather than air combustion.
This is good news. This, among other reasons, is why I remain optimistic about energy supply century. This is why Warmists will always be on the back foot. They talk of peak oil, dirty coal etc. but human innovation, invention and discovery wins out. Just look at shale gas.
My only problem with the article is the following:
In what ways is CO2 it “bad for the environment” even with a doubling?
The biosphere has seen decades of greening.
The Sahel has been greening including parts of the Sahara.
Greenhouse growers routinely pump in over 2.5 times current atmospheric levels.
There has been no global warming for 16 years.
There is no evidence of unusual extreme weather trends………………
Clean carbon? As if. I propose scrapping carbon credits instead burying deniers alive deep underground instead. This way we can keep plundering carbon to fly* across the globe so we can warn poor people who can’t afford carbon just how bad carbon is.
Further I believe we may have to change the word to ‘the stuff that must not be named’ as saying c****n normalises it’s evil and makes Mother Earth so~0 sad . Whilst some may baulk at burying deniers who are still breathing this is for the greater good of our children and their children and besides deniers clearly have no souls and do not count as human. They carry the mark!
*With a Carbon Collector Card Program (CCCP) I think the rate is about 1 denier buried alive per air mile which is why Al Gore is more god than saint. Credits can be exchanged for goods such as wicker baskets made by skilled four year olds – with all profits used to educate these heathens barbarians that burning anything to stave off hunger is bad as they should be working in corporate sweat shops for their keep.
/sarc**
** although this may well be based on elements of truth.
Re Lazy T.
We (the ordinary readers at WUWT) don’t see a lot of the nasty stuff I’m sure.
One of the reasons I keep coming back here and recommending it to other folks is the considered language and well moderated (transparent and even handed) treatment commenters receive.
If Lazy T crossed the line in the opinion of Anthony and mods then that is good enough for me. In the early days of my climate learning curve I made the mistake of asking a few innocent questions on RC and SkS and was either caustically told to go read some stuff or my comments were black holed. I never go back there anymore! Besides they don’t have a Willis E or a Bob T :-).
SAMURAI says:
February 20, 2013 at 10:26 pm
……. The liquid salts in LFTRs reach 1,600C at single atmospheric pressure, which is used to heat up Helium gas in a heat exchanger to run gas turbines and generate electricity.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I’m just a Welder but it’s my understanding that are concerns in the industry about near term shortages of Helium. The predicted Helium shortage Impacts MRI machines as well as certain welding process.
Nothing “clean” or “dirty” for that matter about emitting CO2. NOT emitting it is starving plants and causing food poverty for humans and for wildlife. So totally screwed up it isn’t worth pointing out the fallacies.
…..this might have been said already
Isn’t this just some way to use iron oxide to split CO2 into C and O2? not producing CO2….just C?
DOE comment on the same activity
http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/press/2013/130129_doe_supported.html