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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Katherine says:
Unfortunately, it also produces carbon dioxide, which is difficult to capture and bad for the environment.
“Facepalm. Drank the Kool-Aid didn’t he?”
It is hard to understand his level of ignorance. CO2 is necessary for all life on Earth. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 has been up to twenty times higher in the past, with no adverse effects. When CO2 was high, the biosphere thrived.
And CO2 is typically between 500 ppm and 5,000 ppm in office buildings and residences. No one even notices.
Finally, some folks seem to have the notion that plants grow by using soil. This is incorrect. They grow by ingesting CO2 from the air; they strip off the carbon atom, and emit an oxygen molecule. Plant growth comes from the CO2 in the air. When you look at a plant, you are seeing CO2 in action.
This is the America that I thought was lost. Shame on me. Leave it to American scientists/ engineers (and the free enterprise system that will exploit this new tech) to find a way to solve a problem (even if it is a non problem -CO2) and not let this fossil fuel gift lie fallow. Now we are going to find out what the real CAGW protestors want – it isn’t clean CO2-free fuel to save us all!
“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.”
If irony hadn’t been invented, the clonatologists would have invented it. So Donald Brown, following your thinking, if a technically unproven hypothesis like “CO2 will cause unstoppable planetary destruction……
To Moe:
The reference to CO2 levels being 3000 ppm is from millions of
years ago. Humans were not around. However, humans can easily
tolerate CO2 levels up to 5000 ppm with no ill effects. This
has been established on U.S. Navy submarines.
As to your other fears–agriculture will be able to grow food just
fine. Plants thrived during the period the dinosauria ruled the
Earth–and CO2 was 1500-2000 ppm. Plants conquered the land
during the Devonian period–and CO2 was 3000-4000 ppm.
Most plants, including food plants, like high
CO2 levels. As to your fears about drought, flood, extreme
weather–these have not been reliably linked to increased CO2.
There have been a horde of postings on this blog exploring
the lack of evidence for such linkages. Use the search
box on this site and read.
Rick writes “How do you separate that? You could pump it to high pressure where the CO2 liquifies ”
They’re going to need to do that for efficient transportation anyway. Unless of course there is a handy stable geological structure nearby to deposit into.. Which is like…never.
brians356 says:
“If they have a similar heat rate and no parasitic load, the costs of transport and sequestration are small in comparison”.
I have to disagree strongly here! At ~1billion tons of coal consumption in the US, that works out to 3.47billion tons of CO2. Shipping that much CO2 will require specialized train cars and amounts to about 20million train cars per year. SInce the CO2 will be shipped under pressure and in liquid form it will have to avoid populated areas during transportation. Any severe train crash will release massivie quantities of cold, very dense CO2 that will hug the ground and potentially kill people within several miles downwind of the accident. Also, there is no proven technology to show that storing these massive amounts of CO2 (contaminated with SO2 and possibly other polluntants) underground can be done safely without damaging the water table . To make the claim that safe transportation and storage will be insignificant is beyond credible belief. At a minimum it will cost almost 4x the cost of shipping the CO2 than it does the coal, and probably more. Then you will have the added cost of sequestering it.
Cgris R:
Loaded many of those depleted uranium rounds on A10s in Desert Storm and never worried about them. Though some of the infantry guys hitting the area after the A10 shot the place up probably should have been wearing their gas masks. I do wonder how many lung cancer cases we are going to see in those guys in future years.
The problem when you begin concentrating uranium by whatever means is not the uranium itself, it uses an alpha decay pathway (with a small probability of larger fission chunks) and alpha particles are only really dangerous if they are inside of you…skin will stop them. The problem is some of the daughters in the decay pathway (particularly radon) can get into your lungs rather easily.
So if some ingenious chemist found a way to remove the silica and aluminum from the ash to use in glass and metal processes, you’d be left with messy things to get rid of. U238 isn’t much use (I suppose you could make red pottery glaze with it – joking here btw I’m pretty sure they stopped that in the 70’s). Mercury isn’t too nice either (though not bad in elemental form). It isn’t that they are evil, it’s just that there is no use for these and storing them is not easy. As it stands now the ash can be used in concrete and you wouldn’t notice the difference with a Geiger counter as concrete is already pretty active from all the other ingredients. (I love to put a Geiger counter up to peoples’ lovely granite counter tops and watch them have a conniption.) My comment was more about how 10ppm becomes 1 part per thousand in the residue – still not bad, but a lot more concentrated than atmospheric CO2.
Just to add to the CO2 is good for and essential for plants, marijuana growers apparently think that a 1500ppm CO2 environment is good for increasing crop yield. And those guys are serious about crop yields. Maybe there’s an untapped market for all this “excess” CO2. There are apparently 400,000 “authorized” (indoor?) growers in California alone. Who new?
And semi-related, L Berkeley Labs (researcher Evan Mills) came to the conclusion in 2011, that indoor marijuana growers consume 1% of US electricity (3% of California’s) from an article in the San Francisco Business Times, April 2011. Got to be a higher percentage now in 2013 with CO and WA states legalizing or decriminalizing. Wonder what the pot industry’s carbon balance/footprint is…
“Is it as good as cold fusion?”
I guess it’s a case of, if it works and is economically sustainable, will it placate the needs of the CO2 thermageddon brigade until their orthodoxy has run its course and the scientific method once again returns to mainstream science?
Maybe then we will recognise that in our current CO2 starved era we should exploit rather than waste any rich source of fertilzer.
Chris r, so,what was the climate like mills of years ago,when the co2 concentration was 3000ppm? It is not breathing the co2 that I am worried about, I am sure humans can survive that, but agriculture is more than just plant. It involves having a benign climate. Something here in Australia we are struggling with. In the north we are getting repeated floods and in the south east we have drought like conditions. Farmers are going broke and food output is declining. We are experiencing record heat records, so that cherry farmers are concerned that the cool weather they need during winter is no longer cool enough to set the fruit. I gather that you have never tried to grow a crop otherwise you would not simplify the process of food production down to plants growing.
Well I stand as one with the trees. What about our life giving CO2. We were struggling before the industrial revolution at 280ppm.
CRS, Dr.P.H. says:
February 20, 2013 at 8:35 pm
Here’s a recent white paper on the concept, published by Babock & Wilcox. http://www.babcock.com/library/pdf/BR-1892.pdf
Thanks for this link it does put things in a better perspective than the University propanganda.
I had to laugh at the comment that the students voluntarily quit after working so hard on shifts for over a week. Doesn’t sound like much commitment to me. I wonder if they understand how much effort is required for most developments?
The fact that B&W are involved have studied this gives a lot of credence to the development , although we all know that many companies are eager to get on the gravy train from the FEDS. Quickly reading throug the B&W release one sees that there is a lot more to building a commercial plant than meets the eye from the university release. Having worked on similar development projects one knows that there are numerous engineering challenges that will arise and that most projects fail for a variety of reasons.
From the B&W report below it is noteworthy that the government has no concern over increasing the cost of electricity considerably.
“CONSOL Energy performed a preliminary economic
analysis of the CDCL process following DOE/NETL’s
Quality Guidelines. The study shows that the CDCL process
has the potential to meet DOE’s target of 90% CO2 capture
with less than a 35% increase in cost of electricity (COE).”
Is CO2 such a threat that we need to increase the cost by 35%. I know the mantra from the greenies is that the cost will drop dramatically, but real world experience show that the cost of such developments always go up. An entire plant is much more complex than the small part demonstrated by the university in a lab. And this does not consider the complex problem of sequestration.
See below that another EPA release claims that CO2 is benign when hawking it as a cleaning agent. I guess Lisa Jackson was wrong and lied in court.
http://www.epa.gov/dfe/pubs/garment/lcds/micell.htm
“Carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring and generally benign substance. At room temperature, CO2 can exist in the form of a gas and is therefore used to carbonate soft drinks and other beverages. In solid form, carbon dioxide is known as dry ice. At room temperature, CO2 can also exist as a liquid if kept in a closed system at an elevated pressure. Liquid CO2 has a gas-like consistency and a low surface tension allowing it to function as a very effective cleaning medium when combined with detergents.”
CO2 is not as easy to handle and transport (although possible) as liquid hydrocarbons due to it’s properties as shown below:
The critical temperature for carbon dioxide is 88 degrees Fahrenheit. This is the maximum temperature at which carbon dioxide can be a liquid. The process of liquefying carbon dioxide must therefore keep the liquid below 88 degrees Fahrenheit.
The minimum pressure needed to keep carbon dioxide a liquid is 5.1 atm to remain a liquid, no matter how cold it is.
Remember that President Bush cancelled the clean coal project in Illinois because it was experiencing huge cost over runs, Obama resumed funding for reasons that I don’t understand.
Considering the $90+ billion dollar waste in alternative energies so far this technology is probably a much better investment in tax dollars than solar panels, wind turbines, and converting our trees into biofuels.
Has anyone calculated the commercial BTU produced per dollar spent on alternative fuels?
To Moe:
I have grown many crops. Corn is very big in the USA. It
may be news to you down under, but we have had droughts
in this country before, as well. You live with them as best
you can.
You seem to have bought into the hype distributed gleefully
by activists disguising themselves as scientists. There is
very weak evidence that our current levels of elevated CO2
(100 ppm higher than in pre-industrial times) are causing
increased severity of drought. A review by Cook et al.
in 2007 (Cook, E.R., Seager, R., Cane, M.A. and Stahle, D.W. 2007.
North American drought: Reconstructions, causes, and consequences.
Earth-Science Reviews 81: 93-134) for North American droughts
cited much more intense droughts prior to the industrial period.
In fact, here’s a good quote:
Globally, the picture is the same. Smith et al. (Smith, T.M., Yin, X.
and Gruber, A. 2006. Variations in annual global precipitation (1979-2004),
based on the Global Precipitation Climatology Project 2.5° analysis.
Geophysical Research Letters 33: 10.1029/2005GL025393) point out that
for their studied period, there was no net change in global precipitation
.
As I mentioned before, plants thrived at elevated concentrations
of CO2. The climate was about 10 degrees C. warmer as a global average
than today,
Why do you keep bringing up 3000 ppm? Owen in GA
mentioned that figure as having been achieved far before humans had
contributed. We will never get there, because it would take burning about
2.5 times more fossil fuel than exists on Earth.
http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/coalpower/ewr/co2/oxy-combustion/in-situ.html You can see clearly in their diagrams that it produces just as much CO2 as a coal burning plant, but as many state, the question is one of efficiency. If we are to put it to good use, it would make more sense to pipe it into greenhouses and hydroponics than to pump it into the ground, where you can expect that in time it will produce caves and valleys where the air is unbreatheable.
not to mention the cost of compression
Sorry Anthony, I have to call BS on this one. And I’m not anti-coal either. This is essentially a content-free, gee-whiz puff piece. I have an MS in analytical chemistry. And I haven’t the foggiest idea what these Ohio-Staters are claiming to have accomplished.
We WUWT readers are big boys and big girls. We deserve some real information, as in details. Apparently CO2 is generated, as is the case with conventional coal-fired power plants. Then what happens to this ‘evil’ gas?
Does it magically disappear? Do they shoot it into outer space? Do they react it with metal oxides to form carbonates, which they then use to build pyramids to appease the Flying CO2 Monster? Or do they pump it into the ocean, as in, “Out of sight, out of mind?”
And no, I’m not motivated to click on the links. I do not expect to find a reasonable level of information density there either.
This clean coal article would be par for the course at Discover magazine, but it’s not up to your usual standards of excellence. I know that you can do better.
@Larry Fields: Imagine if you paid for this free website… I think you’re being a little harsh here. If you are not interested, fine, say so. It seems that 191 people thought enough of the post to read it and comment. The piece is appropriate to those of us who want to be aware of things that are related to CO2, energy and our lives.