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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George Turner,
Thanks for the more complete overview of the technology.
So basically we are still going to see sulfur-oxygen compounds in the exhaust due to the sulfur in the coal, but it will eliminate the nitrogen-oxygen compounds. Still that is a step in the right direction. I am still a little concerned with what other contaminants in coal will get oxidized by the oxygen in the FeO3. Of course I’d have to look at the bond potentials in the conditions in the chamber to see if the other elements could break the O2 off the FeO3 to oxidize. I’m pretty sure the sulfur will, but I haven’t looked at the typical contaminant load in coal to see what other products we might see. The ash containment is a nice feature since we wouldn’t have to invest in expensive smoke stack scrubbers to keep it from flying away. The mercury and other heavy contaminants would be right there in the residue in the reaction chamber as well. It does make for a neat package from an environmental standpoint. The coal would just keep making FeO as fuel to feed into the real combustion chamber.
Won’t the nitrogen and oxygen from the air that “burns” the FeO to FeO3 encounter high enough temperatures to form NOx though? I am not sure we aren’t moving the pollution formation from the coal combustion to the iron combustion phase. There are lots of physical and chemical engineering hurdles to overcome here. In the end there will have to be a cost-benefit calculation to determine whether the loss in efficiency is worth what little environmental benefit is derived from the process.
I don’t see how [they] avoid combustion to release energy. Combustion is universal.
“Now what is ‘death train’ Hansen going to do?”
Mr. Hansen is currently into getting himself arrested in Washington D.C. while maintaining his job as manager of a branch of NASA in an expensive NYC facility, and pulling down a six figure salary with generous benefits. (And also generating meaningless “research” at taxpayer expense).
Meanwhile, his opposition to the Keystone pipeline will do absolutely nothing to change the climate. NOTHING. But it will raise the price of energy in the U.S., cause us to lose jobs (not his of course), and make all of our lives more difficult as we try to satisfy our energy needs…thank you Mr. Hansen!
I do think this is an important anti-pollution development that could save the coal industry. Coal’s real problem is particulate emissions from burning. I believe this eliminates those particulates entirely and probably cheaper than stack scrubbers. This is exciting for the coal industry– BUT– what are the capital costs to retrofit plants and build new ones? what’s cost comparison with NatGas plants for construction and operation? Those numbers will decide the fate of US coal. The contained CO2? Meh, make soda pop out of it, fill green houses with it, bury it. Not a big issue.
This is not the death knell for Hansen and his ilk. If the technology catches on, and if they find some way to contain all that CO2 indefinitely, then in twenty years when everyone has forgotten the global warming scare we will start to see claims of a global cooling scare again. Catastrophic cooling caused by a lack of CO2 from industrial processes, in turn caused by the evils of capitalism depriving Gaia of her needed life blood because of evil profits.
These people have little shame, and even less of a grasp on reality, and their motivation has always been political and ideological. As in the past, when the end of the world that the current Malthusian death cult is predicting fails to arrive, they will simply fade into the background for a while until some new barely plausible end of the world scenario presents itself for them to exploit. If someone invented a free energy machine that had near zero impact of any kind, a miracle machine in effect, these people would decry it as the ultimate evil, because it would take the power they have, and the potential power they want over people, out of their hands and into the hands of those they would rather rule than accept as equals.
Your betters have told you coal and CO2 are evil. You don’t need to know why, you just need to accept and send them money and let them run your life.
Doesn’t sound that revolutionary to me. A similar process has been used for nearly 200 years to smelt iron ore. In fact, I’d say the not releasing CO2 claim is misleading, if not false. CO2 is released, the same amount as conventional burning. It’s just that the CO2 is captured, which is unrelated to the coal – iron oxide chemistry.
I agree. This is a yawner, unless there is something I’m missing. “Burning” coal vs oxidizing it by means of a complicated and expensive series of reactions both produce precisely the same amount of energy per kilogram of coal, because the chemical reaction is still C + O_2 -> CO_2. You can fancy it up, insert additional catalytic steps, and make it as costly as you like but at the end of the day you’ve still burned a kilogram of coal and produced just as much CO_2.
Once produced, CO_2 itself is a kind of “ash”. It is energetically stable. It will hang out until something adds energy back (how much? just as much as was released burning it) to remove the oxygens and turn the carbon either back into coal or into e.g. a hydrocarbon. At the moment, the only cost effective way to do that is to do nothing with it but release it into the atmosphere and wait for the photosynthesizing plants of the world to do their job, just as they have for the last billion years or so. It would be lovely if we could take pure CO_2 and pure water and pump it into one end of a large factory and, perhaps using solar energy, transform it into gasoline by the time it reached the end of the building with anything like a competitive efficiency, but so far I’ve heard of nothing like this. Until it exists, there are lots of ways to capture or sequester CO_2 produced by burning, all of them expensive, and there is nowhere to put the almost four metric tons of it one produces burning a single metric ton of coal.
What are they thinking?
rgb
This is so stupid and misleading that it is not even funny.
What they do is the following cycle.
Reaction 1 : 2 Fe2O3 + 3 C -> 4 Fe + 3 CO2 (endothermic reaction needs 505 kJ)
Then
Reaction 2 : 4 Fe + 3 O2 -> 2 Fe2O3 (exothermic reaction provides 1684 kJ)
Do you recognise what that is ?
Reaction 1 is the smelting furnace, that’s how we have been doing iron for the last few thousands years.
Reaction 2 is rusting iron. Of course as we won’t wait decades that the iron rusts, we’ll help it along by using high temperature.
So basically what they propose is to use a smelting furnace to produce iron that we let rust and then put the rust back in the smelting furnace to get iron that we let rust …
If you want to have a feel for the staggering stupidity, you add the 2 equations and obtain :
3 C + 3 O2 -> 3 CO2 (exothermic reaction provides 1 179 kJ)
Yes, right. This whole revolutionary invention is fully equivalent to just burning coal what you can do in your home oven without needing a university lab and a professor.
Let us recapitulate.
This Kafka’s Castle does exactly the same thing like burning coal but does so by introducing an incredibly expensive and crazy system involving grinding coal to microparticles and transporting energy via hot iron.
What do you reckon would be the economics compared to simply burning coal … ?
Ah yes, as a bonus you get pure CO2 but you don’t know what to do with it.
Put it in a stack perhaps 🙂
Besides if you wanted pure CO2, you could burn coal in pure oxygen anyway.
As a kid, I watched and counted the coal cars on a train taking 100 car-loads of coal to the powerplant every Monday-Friday. Imagine what we are going to do with over 300 train-car loads of CO2 produced every day by a single powerplant of the size of the one in Labadie Mo. And the cost of doing so, and what effect you think that will have on the cost of the electricity produced. Expensivie solar and windmill energy will look like a bargain.
I should add… thats 300 train-car loads of liguid CO2, not gaseous CO2.
sorry, sorry, sorry… just woke up, liquid not liguid.
George Turner says:
February 20, 2013 at 11:31 pm .
They’re just reducing iron oxide in one chamber, letting the oxygen in the iron oxide combine with carbon in the coal to produce nothing but CO2
Oxidizing the iron doesn’t produce any CO2 because there’s no carbon with it
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Of course there is, otherwise what would be the point.
At high temps rust splits CO2 into C(gr) and O2……
CO2 IS NOT BAD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT!
IT’S PLANT FOOD!!!!!!!!! Idiots wasting time on a non-issue. What are they going to do with all of the CO2? Hunh?
This technology is interesting for one reason and one reason only: NO AIR! The volume of the stack gas is much reduced, and with refrigeration could be a liquid CO2 stream. The downside is that oxidizing coal with pure oxygen proceeds at a temperature somewhere around 7,000 degrees F, so the reaction chamber must be exotic materials and cooled by elaborate channels.
We could just mix the sequestered carbon dioxide with water and store it in bottles – with the appropriate sweeteners and flavourings we could call it “Carbon-Coala”!
I have a serious issue with all this oxygen sequestration.
This [snip] is most probably a Chinese government agent placed in the US to pull the stupid Americans legs. He is, so far, very successful.
The press release is obviously aimed at the semantically challenged damyankees.
That’s you, buddy.
REPLY: I snipped your hate speech, that’s all you buddy – Anthony
all our CO2 has done so far is keep us out of an ice Age .. Now Britain’s closing its home supplied coal-fired Power stations so we can import costly gas .. probably exporting our coal to China .. Luckily China is on another planet .. or is that our politicians ???
Actually, all this CO2 is very useful pumped down oil wells to extract more oil. There is a huge market for it IMO.
People, you are all mouth and no ears.
We will have a serious issues with oxygen sequestration.
They could compress the CO2, put into canisters and sell it for a profit. Win win!
I have wondered for a long time why there aren’t greenhouses around every gas and coal power plant. The greenhouses could use the heat in the winter, the CO2 to enhance the growth, and excess power capacity at night to increase the growing day length.
MorningGuy says: “Pumping CO2 in the ground is fine as long as it’s not anywhere near where I live. I heard about a lake in Africa with a bed of CO2 that was released in an earth quake, CO2 is heavier than air so it “flowed” down a hill and suffocated a whole village instantly. Can they assure me the same thing won’t happen at a CO2 sequestering site ??? I don’t think so.
That would be Lake Nyos, which sits on a volcanic vent. The deadly cloud extended up to 15 miles, and four entire villages were gassed. Some scientists claim volcanoes don’t emit much CO2. This one does, indicating their assessment may be off by an order of magnitude. But that’s acceptible in PostNormal science.
@D.B. Stealey
>Out of all the world’s economies, the U.S. has done about the best job of reducing emissions.
It is actually a bit better than that. The Eastern forests of the USA are absorbing a huge amount of CO2 and no one is crediting that. They have been expanding since the early 50’s. The greens won’t count it because it means the net emissions from the US are perhaps 1/4 or 1/5 of the usual claims. It is about as logical as Calif saying that hydro power is not ‘renewable energy’. It is tree-stump stupid.
Some real world questions.
How is this different from the Fischer-Tropsch process?
What is the ratio of pulverized coal & the ‘iron pellets” – A 588 megawatt power plant needs 300 tons an hour. How much power is needed to move the hundreds of tons/hour of iron in and out of the chamber and cool it down?
Since I was working on a power plant next door to the ND – Great Plains Synfuels Plant, which uses the Fischer-Tropsch process, I have kept up with its progress. Back in 2000 the started a CO2 capture to feed the Canadian oil fields. Their site states they pull 50% of 18,000 tn/day of CO2 and ship it north to inject in the wells. If I remember correct it is a 6″ high pressure line.
They do make a profit off this, little water in Sak. Canada and works well.
I have been following this chemical looping technology for several years. It DOES produce CO2, as others have noted here. I assume the reporter that wrote this story misinterpreted what was being told.
You can store the CO2 under pressure for a time, but it will build up to the point something will have to be done with it. In any reaction of coal and oxygen, there is at least twice the weight of CO2 generated as the weight of coal used. The fact that the off gas from the process is almost pure CO2 and water means you do not need an expensive separation technique to remove the CO2 from the nitrogen that normally comes along for the ride in traditional combustion. That nitrogen also carries away heat with it that could be used to generate steam.
This is a similar process to what is called oxy-fuel, where pure oxygen is fed to a boiler with fuel and to allow a high precentage of CO2 to be in the flue gas. It takes a significant amount of power to run the air separation unit, however, up to 25% of the electrical output. Reacting the oxygen with iron the the chemical looping process significantly reduces the energy drain of this step.
The statement, “Basically they found a way to oxidize coal and extract energy without releasing any CO2.” is incorrect and misleading.