Nanotechnology meets CO2 capture
Did you know that a coal-fired power plant can produce almost 500 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) every hour?
The idea of capturing CO2 emissions from power plants and storing it in the ground is both easier and harder than you think.
It is easier because most of the technology needed to do it exists today. In fact, people have been putting CO2 into the ground to help recover oil for many years. However, it’s harder than you think because the technology is both expensive and isn’t widely used at the scale needed to capture and store CO2 from a typical power plant.
That’s where my team and I come in. We’ve been looking at ways of using the things we’ve learned from our Nanotechnology research program to reduce the cost of capturing CO2.
GE is investing heavily in cleaner coal, aka integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) technology, which allows precombustion CO2 capture . IGCC involves turning the coal into a synthesis gas and removing undesirable components such as sulfur and CO2 before burning it to produce electricity. The potential for cost savings comes from the fact that the gases are at high pressure and concentration, making them easier to separate.
Membranes are one of the technologies we’ve been working on. For those of you who aren’t familiar the concept, membranes are physical barriers that let some gases penetrate through them much faster than other gases. As you can see in the figure, the membranes we are developing have small holes that approach the size of the molecules. These pores tend to let smaller molecules through more rapidly. With proper nanoengineering of the molecular structure to favor selective adsorption and surface transport along the pore walls, we can also produce membranes that favor larger molecules over smaller ones. We are currently working in the lab on minimizing performance degradation over long periods of time as well as making membrane units large enough to handle CO2 at the scales produced by a power plant.
Check back here for occasional updates from our lab as we make progress on this important work. I’d also recommend our company Ecomagination site for the latest news on GE’s technologies for reducing emissions, utilizing renewable energy, making the electrical grid smarter, and eco-related activities.
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