Optimizing Carbon Dioxide Removal from Coal-Fired Power Plants

In some of the first results from a federally funded initiative to find new ways of capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from coal-fired power plants, Rice University scientists have found that CO2 can be removed more economically using "waste" heat - low-grade steam that cannot be used to produce electricity. The find is significant because capturing CO2 with conventional technology is an energy-intensive process that can consume as much as one-quarter of the high-pressure steam that plants use to produce electricity.

Transcript

00:00:05 we're trying to find a more economic way of capturing the carbon dioxide from the flue gas from coal-fired power plants the reason why we're doing this is that we're going to have to depend on fossil energy for some time into the future using fossil energy results in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which can result in climate change if we can capture the co2 economically then

00:00:31 there's a big demand for high-pressure clean co2 for enhanced oil recovery but the trick is how can we capture the co2 in flue gas that's only like 30 percent co2 and it's one atmosphere so do we asked the the academic and industry community to figure out what are some new innovative ways to address this co2 release problem from coal-fired power plants and if you can come up with the

00:00:59 technology to reduce even just a little bit then you will address the problem in a real meaningful way because right now there is no way to take care of the co2 that's coming out of these coal-fired power plants so we have a tank of co2 nitrogen mixture here we flowed that through various controllers in our to our system which comes through and then is introduced into our solution here

00:01:21 which is designed to absorb the co2 and the exit stream coming off is essentially co2 free at this point and then from there what we're able to do then is with the solution with the captured co2 we can then take it somewhere else and Di's orbit and reclaim the co2 for later usage so the bubbler that you just saw it's great but it's a batch process so you can use the

00:01:41 absorbent only once and so the next step for us is to use this novel material called a ceramic foam the idea behind this is that using this we will build a combined absorber and be sortable unit which then can be operated as a continuous process so you put the absorbent solution in it removes the co2 and then you regenerate the absorbent solution so thereby it becomes a

00:02:06 continuous process and it's a lot more economical to with we just can't keep using electricity from coal-fired power plants and still be happy with the co2 being released into the atmosphere