According to his economic modeling, the rough cost of capture will be $35 per ton of CO2, a figure that is at least half the cost of other capture methods, such as amine scrubbing. The cost of retrofitting an old coal plant with capture equipment, for example, could in theory run to more than $100 per ton.
With the potential sale of magnesium carbonate, the cost could flip into a net financial gain, said Mercier.
Some carbon capture experts are skeptical, however. Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said "it's hard to believe this could be a major breakthrough."
"It could be a niche market," he said.
The idea of forming carbonates has been examined before, and rejected by some because of the magnitude of rock that would be needed to capture CO2 at commercial scale, he said. It also is tricky to perfect the chemical reactions and ensure they move fast enough, he said.
If the reactions are not efficient, the cost would rise significantly, he said. Many high-emitting sources also may not have appropriate rock available to do similar work, according to Herzog.
"This is officially bollocks (baloney). There are always mass transfer and cost issues that overwhelm even pilot scale projects and the costs becomes exceedingly high quickly," added Julio Friedmann, a CCS expert at U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Will future research be funded?
Mercier acknowledged the difficulties but said he had tweaked the combinations of metals in his chemical reactor to address prior problems. He has been working for more than two and a half years on finding the right types of rocks with the right combination of minerals to react efficiently with emissions from burned fossil fuels, he said.
In a report last year, the Global CCS Institute found that technologies reusing captured CO2 could play a role in controlling emissions in some markets, even if their global potential for controlling the greenhouse gas is small.
Regardless of whether Mercier's test works, it signals Canada's importance with research on capturing CO2, considering global financial cutbacks in the energy industry, another U.S.-based analyst said. The country is building what could be the world's first large-scale, integrated demonstration of carbon capture and sequestration technology on an existing coal plant at SaskPower's Boundary Dam Power Station in Saskatchewan.
That project took a step forward yesterday with SaskPower's announcement of the signing of an agreement with oil giant Cenovus, which agreed to purchase all of the captured CO2 from Boundary Dam for use in enhanced oil recovery operations near Weyburn. SaskPower said the project -- which would capture and store one million tons of metric CO2 annually from a coal plant -- was on track to become operational in April 2014.
Similarly, Canada has been aggressive in funding research like Mercier's and carbon capture research on oil sands operations via national funds and a $2 billion money pot from Alberta, said the analyst. Mercier's grant came as part of a $3.75 million distribution last month from Carbon Management Canada on various carbon control technologies.
The bulk of global carbon capture funding, though, came several years ago, when national climate change legislation was in play in both the United States and Canada. The $2 billion pot in Alberta is funding several commercial-scale projects that are close to construction, but no similar scale of money has come forth since then.
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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.