EMISSIONS CAPTURE: A Canadian researcher hopes to prove that by running the emissions from an industrial plant through pulverized rock he can both capture carbon dioxide and turn it into a salable product.
Image: flickr/KaCey97007
A researcher is about to test a technology that he says could be a breakthrough for curbing greenhouse gas emissions from coal plants, natural gas generators and other industrial facilities.
Canadian professor Guy Mercier's answer to curbing fossil fuel emissions is literally set in stone. With $300,000 in new grant money from Carbon Management Canada, a network of academic centers, he plans to run gas emitted from a Holcim cement plant through pulverized concrete and rock.
If everything goes to plan, the resulting chemical reaction will capture 80 percent of the carbon dioxide from the tested gas stream at a lower cost than other capture methods.
In theory, the cost of capturing CO2 could head to zero, since the resulting magnesium carbonate formed from chemical reactions between cement plant emissions and rock can be sold at a profit to the wastewater and steel-making industries, Mercier said.
"This can be applied anywhere there's a huge amount of CO2 emitted from smokestacks," said Mercier, an environmental technology professor at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, part of the University of Quebec. He is working with researchers from the University of Calgary and the University of Melbourne on the project.
Tweaking the rock mixture would allow the work to be applied to coal, he said.
Mercier's work fits into a growing industry focus on carbon capture and utilization, or using captured CO2 for commercial products, rather than storing it underground, where the gas holds no economic value. Earlier this year, the carbon capture industry added a "U" to the title of an annual CCS conference in Pittsburgh, making it the carbon capture, utilization and sequestration conference.
Use it; don't lose it
That "U" typically means enhanced oil recovery, but there is a growing interest in alternative funding options, such as using captured CO2 for algae production or pulp and paper processing. The firm Skyonic, for example, announced a deal earlier this year to capture carbon dioxide from a cement plant and turn the gas into baking soda, hydrocholoric acid and other products.
While some experts think these solutions are impractical for wide-scale use, others say there is a need for additional tests capturing carbon dioxide from cement, one of the highest-emitting industries.
Mercier's work comes as Nature Climate Change published a perspective piece Sunday, "Last Chance for Carbon Capture Storage," saying governments need to either increase their commitment to carbon capture technology or "accept its failure and recognize that continued expansion of power generation from burning fossil fuels is a severe threat." Carbon capture has never been proved at scale in the power sector but is considered the chief way to control heat-trapping emissions from coal, gas and other fossil fuels.
Mercier said he chose a cement plant to test his patented technology for the simple reason that Quebec does not have coal-fired power plants. It also holds a large number of abandoned mines with adequate rock supplies, he said.
He will blend magnesium and calcium-rich rocks with concrete, turn them into a powder, and place the pulverized mix into a reaction chamber attached to the emission stream from the Holcim plant, about an hour from Montreal.
Trapping the carbon in rock
Once the CO2-rich flue gas hits the pulverized rocks, the resulting chemical reaction produces a solid of magnesium carbonate. That solid then can be sold to wastewater operators for water treatment, and to the steel industry, which can use it during the manufacturing process, said Mercier.
The chemical reactor "is like a small plant within the big plant," he said.
The initial field test at the cement plant -- which will begin in late 2013 and run for a year -- will be small, on less than 1 percent of the plant's emissions. That will require about 1.5 tons of rock, Mercier said.
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8 Comments
Add CommentDoes the use of Magnesium Carbonate end up returning CO2 to the atmosphere?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSonoran: Yes, the uses that I'm aware of for magnesium carbonate in the steel industry (metallurgical flux) involve melting it as a component of slag, and would certainly result in re-releasing the CO2. And using it for pH control in water treatment would tend to release the CO2 as well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIs there any way that the captured CO2 could be used in punishment of spammers like Shirl03? Perhaps hard labor shovelling loads of magnesium carbonate?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBetter to avoid producing the CO2 in the first place. Nuclear Power can easily do that. Just have to muzzle and marginalize Big Carbon who will buy anyone & everyone to prevent that from happening.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNope, entirely feasible. Would take some decades to achieve, of course, changing 85% of the World's energy supply & infrastructure cannot be done overnight. Where I live in the North, our heat was supposed to have been supplied through district heating and 10 MWth Slowpoke III reactors, at $1k per kwth, about 1/10th the cost of present Oil heat. The reactors were blockaded by widespread protests from paid-by-oil Greenie groups.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd Methanol/DME fuel can be made from Biomass/Waste/Volcanic-waste-atmospheric-industrial-agricultural CO2 plus Nuclear H2, Nuclear Electricity & Nuclear Process Heat. And Methanol feedstock can and is used to make synthetic diesel. Quite economical, cheaper than present Oil products, when scaled up.
So it can be done, but the Oiligarchy don't want that to happen. They would rather preserve the status quo and put up some Wind Turbines & Solar Panels to keep what they call "the useful idiots" happy.
It is still better to use carbon that has been captured instead of releasing additional carbon from original sources. This gives the choice of releasing 1 carbon atom twice or 2 carbon atoms once. Obviously releasing 1 is better than releasing 2. Scale that up to thousands of tons and it becomes a good thing. It is even better if it pays for itself as a "free" carbon reduction method.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The firm Skyonic, for example, announced a deal earlier this year to capture carbon dioxide from a cement plant and turn the gas into baking soda, hydrocholoric acid and other products."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is the biggest scam yet, and/or this author doesn't author doesn't know much about chemistry.
Just a thought from a severely un-knowledgeable
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisearth inhabitant... are there any plants which
might serve, in the long term, to remove CO2
from the air/sea, by forming various carbonates
(say, of Ca, Mg, Fe, Al or ?)? This would be
in addition to their usual conversion of water
and CO2 into organic matter, which would simply
return that CO2 to the environment on very short
time scales. Such carbonates would, I think,
form a much more stable and less impactful
sequestration of CO2.
Might require some genetic tweaking though. We
are perhaps not that advanced yet. FWIW.