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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Dr. Fan is merely contriving word games to circumvent the word “burn”. If there’s anything novel here, I hope eventually to see it in a form that doesn’t insult my intelligence.
So what happens after all the Earths OXYGEN IS SEQUESTERED??????
rgbatduke: 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.
to my knowledge, only laboratory scale demonstrations so far.
This is just one particular way to sequester CO2, so it will appeal only to the people who think that is necessary and feasible. CO2 sequestration was included in the “wedges” papers.
oops, that’s “necessary and feasible.” full stop
Re jorgekafkazar says: February 21, 2013 at 9:24 am
Another volcanic area emits CO2. There is a volcanic CO2 venting area near Mammoth Mountain, California. The cross-country ski trail map and nearby trails have CO2 warnings.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-81/Intro/MonitoringData/CO2/CO2.html
“The most likely sources of the CO2 are degassing of intruded magma and gas release from limestone-rich metasedimentary rocks that are heated by magmatic intrusions. The remarkable uniformity in chemical and isotopic composition of the CO2 and accompanying gases at different locations around Mammoth Mountain indicates that there may actually be a large reservoir of gas deep below the mountain from which gas escapes along faults to the surface.”
The carbon is already sequestered. Adding an equal tonnage of our oxygen that will NOT be replaced and is a far more scarce resource (do the maths) has far more serious repercussions.
If not already mentioned – they could use this to trap their carbon. MOFs are clusters of metal atoms connected by organic molecules. Due to their extremely high internal surface area—that could cover an entire football field in a single gram—they can store large volumes of gas. “The MOF can release the adsorbed carbon dioxide when irradiated with light found in sunlight, just like wringing out a sponge,” says lead author Richelle Lyndon
BTW, Anthony & Mods, thanks again for moderating these pages and keeping the unsavory elements out! We welcome dissent, but we don’t need junk. Best, Chuck the DrPH p.s. I still miss REP (Bob Phelan)!
[Reply: We miss him, too. — mod.]
This is the part I like from the Babcock and Wilcox White Paper.
Abstract
Coal-Direct Chemical Looping (CDCL) is an efficient
power generation process. According to preliminary process
and economic simulations, the CDCL process achieves
greater than 90% carbon capture efficiency and meets the
United States (U.S.) Department of Energy’s (DOE) target
of <35% increase in cost of electricity (COE).
“The press release is written to deliberately deceive people who don;t know basic chemistry”
I concur. The chemical equations which would clarify what they’re talking around are AWOL.
Oh, and they were already using iron and iron oxide crushers in coal-fired power plants back in the 1960s. They would crush the coal, then blow the dust into the fire-box… more or less continuously. The coal is not pure carbon; there are always other things mixed in with it with quantities varying with the coal-field, the seam and from place to place within that. Whether you’re just burning it, or using coal slurry pipe-lines to transport it (the acids tend to eat the pipes so they need to be lined, only the chunks of coal and lime-stone tend to bash the liners…), those “contaminants” have to be dealt with. They also already had “bag filters” for fly ash, and lime-stone scrubbers to neutralize acids in the flue gas in the late 1960s, before all of the fuss was raised in the media about “acid rain”. All I’ve seen ballyhooed since seem to be tiny incremental improvements.
CodeTech says:
February 20, 2013 at 6:13 pm
Great, it captures the CO2…Then what do they do with it?
—–
Soda Streams in every home!!!
All we need is nuclear.
What I find really exciting is that all the coal ash is contained apparently w/o needing expensive smoke-stack scrubbers. If they can also convert the CO2 into a product form that is a 2nd win.
Seen a lot of stories like this in Popular Science. Of course we all hope there’s more to it. It sounds like there is a lot of energy required to preprocess/powder the coal. Would be interested in the net energy produced after accounting for the energy required to mine and deliver and prep the coal. Also if it’s so clean why the respirators?
Teresa says:
February 21, 2013 at 12:26 pm
“What I find really exciting is that all the coal ash is contained apparently w/o needing expensive smoke-stack scrubbers.”
Do you think that their system is cheaper than a flue gas scrubber? What gives you that idea?
To CRS, Dr. P.H.:
You wrote in part: ” Also, I didn’t see them mention contaminants (coal is loaded with uranium, radium, arsenic, lead, mercury & other junk), plus sulfur, silica and calcium compounds.”
Huh? I don’t know about some of those others, but uranium in coal only goes < 10 ppm
by weight, so in the case of U, I think your concern about concentration is misplaced.
Andyj please do the maths on the amount of oxygen that will be sequestered with the co2. You will not be too concerned. If you are really concerned about using up oxygen, then you should be advocating the banning burning of all fossil fuels as a lot of oxygen will be used up as it combines with the hydrogen to form h2o.
There has been a lot of mention upstream about starving plants if you sequester co2, well don’t be concerned as the carbon dioxide was not available to plants when the carbon was tied up in coal encore it was burnt, and they seem to have done all right.
Some people up stream have talked about forests absorbing large amounts of co2 etc. that is good so long as the forests are never felled or die and rot. I would be more comfortable if the plants absorbed all the co2, but that is not happening because co2 levels in the atmosphere continue to grow.
If all the CO2 from the roughly 4 gigatons of coal burned each year are captured by this process, this works out to ~92million large (190m3) tanker cars of liquid CO2 to sequester each year. Sequestering such large amounts of CO2 underground is very likely very hazardous at some point down the road. As others have pointed out, what happens to ground water quality as well, especially as the CO2 sequestered will be contaminated with SO2 and perhaps other things as well? In the end, it will still be hideously expensive with absolutely no net positive to speak of as CO2 will NOT cause CAGW.
Oh, and Andyj says:
February 21, 2013 at 10:11 am
“what happens after all the Earths OXYGEN IS SEQUESTERED??????”
According to my calculations and based on current rate of coal consumption it will take well over 3000 years to drop the O2 content in the air down from 21% to 20% so I don’t think that should be too much of a problem at this point.
Andyj says:
February 21, 2013 at 10:52 am
The carbon is already sequestered. Adding an equal tonnage of our oxygen that will NOT be replaced and is a far more scarce resource (do the maths) has far more serious repercussions.
If CO2 has gone up from 0.03% to 0.04% and oxygen has gone down from 20.96% to 20.95%, what is the problem?
Andyj says:
February 21, 2013 at 10:52 am
“The carbon is already sequestered. Adding an equal tonnage of our oxygen that will NOT be replaced and is a far more scarce resource (do the maths) has far more serious repercussions.”
After all the oxygen in the atmosphere is gone, we can easily split water into H2 and O, let the H2 dissipate into space (no we can’t burn it ! We need the oxygen! ), bottle it and sell it to anyone who needs a fresh breath.
Chris R.
But if 900000ppm is carbon and all of that is converted to CO2, then the remaining ash concentration of U just went from 10 ppm to 10 parts per 100,000. now about 50,000 of those parts are hydrogen which reacts to produce water. About 10,000 of those parts are nitrogen which will react to produce NOx, Up to 10,000 of those parts are contained water and trapped oxygen, which now leaves you with 10 parts in 30,000 or 1 part in 3,000. That is starting to get some concentration to it. Volatile distillation will do that to you! These are the numbers for hard coal, the carbon number is more like 600,000 ppm in the softer coals, but the volatile organics go up and you still wind up with a similar distillation number.
Moe,
Photosynthesis stops at about 180ppm CO2. We were at about 280ppm when the little ice age stopped. In geological time it has been as high as 3000ppm with plants and animals thriving quite well. I really don’t like the idea of flirting with plant death, as everything else dies with them when that happens. You see, we are all solar powered, but the plants do all the work.
To Owen in GA:
With respect to concentration of U: So what? You may not be aware of
this, but the U.S. military uses so-called “depleted uranium” shells in
tank-killing cannon ammunition. The penetrator heads on those shells
are well over 90% U. Natural uranium is mostly U-238, which
is very mildly radioactive. Unless you eat it or otherwise ingest it,
it won’t harm you–the alpha particles it puts out are stopped within
the first inch of air, you don’t even need tin foil to stop them!
Now some of those other pollutants being highly concentrated might
be an issue, but the fact that the original post led the list off with U
is a indication that the good Dr. CRS was particularly concerned
with it.
Owe in GA, I have never heard that there was a lower limit of co2 concentration that will support photosynthesis. Do you mind posting the research that you got that conclusion from? Anyway, if we sequester all the co2 from all the coal fired power station from now on, the concentration of co2 in the atmosphere will remain at 40% higher than it was 150 years ago, so I don’t think you have to worry about plant death just yet.
Also could you explain how humans fared when the last time co2 concentrations were 3000ppm? After all that is what is at stake here. Human survivability in a comfortable lifestyle no point in going back to 3,000 ppm if modern agriculture can’t grow food, or the habitat is racked by floods, drought or oth extremes of weather.
My energy markets expert in a large three-letter non-partisan federal agency in foggy bottom says:
The big breakthrough seems to be a way to capture the carbon without generating a lot of parasitic load—in traditional coal burning power plants, it is possible to capture CO2 in the flue but it takes energy to do so, hence the term parasitic load. The parasitic load can be as high as 30%, which means you are burning 30% more fuel and running your equipment 30% of the time just to capture the carbon. Means you would need to build thirty percent more capacity to serve the load that you serve without carbon capture. So, if these guys can get the energy out of the coal without parasitic load that would be huge. That said, I could not tell how efficiently their chemical (non-burning) process generates heat. The heat rate of different processes determines how much electricity you can generate from a unit of coal or other fuel. If they have a similar heat rate and no parasitic load, the costs of transport and sequestration are small in comparison. Of course, we do not know much about where we could dump huge quantities of CO2 without causing earthquakes and in areas where it won’t migrate, etc.
There are other pollutants being scrubbed out of conventional stacks, at considerable cost. I did not notice that it discussed mercury, for example. Maybe the mercury goes on up with the heat. The particulates and such would be presumably not an issue but the solid waste left over would be. Much coal ash currently goes into beneficial uses such as making sheetrock and concrete. Lots of questions betwixt demonstration and commercialization. That’s why most of these ideas are perpetually on the verge, so to speak.