CO2 Capture - What is the Holy Grail?

[power_guy]

Of the three steps in CCS - capture, transportation and storage - capture is by far the most costly (almost 70% of the total cost of CCS). So what could really bring the costs down?

 

Will they be new types of enzymes (see an interesting"]http://powerplantccs...tml]interesting post on enzymes[/url]) for making the CO2 capture process more efficient? Or will it be through better materials for capture? (see here for an interesting"]http://www.azom.com/...474]interesting update on this[/url] ). Or could it be a better method of amine-based CO2 capture? Or could it be something radically different like using"]http://www.powerplan.../alg.html]using algae to capture CO2[/url]?

 

What are your thoughts?

[TonyMcC]

How about trees? See "Reverse global warming"

Edited November 1, 2010 by TonyMcC

[CaptainPanic]

Success depends on the costs.

In industry, costs are made up of: operational costs (energy, material, labour, maintenance, etc) and investments.

 

Regarding CO2 storage, we seem to look only at energy, material and investments... but storage is forever, so logically, there must be at least a little labour forever.

 

Talking in terms of energy, the main efforts are (depending on the method) either:

- the additional chemicals needed to store CO2 in mineral form

- energy for compression for underground storage

I believe that these are rather unavoidable.

 

Regarding the actual storage:

It's there forever. Especially if CO2 is stored in its gaseous state underground, I'd like someone to keep an eye on it... forever. That's a long period... and that has to be paid for. Even if it's a little bit of work, but for a long time, we'd better think about this right now. It's only fair to future generations.

 

Why I think we must keep an eye on this? After all, we humans drilled a bunch of holes into the soil, released the pressure in that soil (so that the soil sinks up to 50 cm as a result)... the gas drilling can even cause earthquakes. Are we really certain that these empty gas fields are stable?

[Mr Skeptic]

Of the three steps in CCS - capture, transportation and storage - capture is by far the most costly (almost 70% of the total cost of CCS). So what could really bring the costs down?

 

My feelings are that it would be most efficient, to not burn the coal in the first place. So, use coal to capture carbon. Coal is well-suited for that task since it is not biodegradable, and as a solid it won't leak out from storage.

[Horza2002]

The difficulty also arises with what to do with the CO2 once you've captured. There is alot of research into using to the make plastics by reacting it with epoxides and zinc BDI catalysts. The major problem with using CO2 as a reagent is that it is extremely stable with respect to chemical processes and the entropic loss of losing a gaseous molecule.