World’s First Carbon Capture Pilot Launching Next Week
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology will get a chance to prove itself next week at the 1,600 MW Schwarze Pumpe coal-fired power plant in Germany. The CCS demonstration will capture up to 100,000 tons of CO2 each year and bury it 3,000 m under a nearby gas field.
The scheme uses oxyfuel technology, which relies on burning coal in pure oxygen and CO2 instead of normal air. This results in a byproduct of almost pure CO2 that is bottled and pumped underground.
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The Schwarze Pump has an output of 12 MW of electricity and 300 MW of thermal power— enough for over 1,000 homes.
While the pilot pump will only run for three years, the company behind the Schwarze Pump plan is commissioning a similar project in France next year.
I am cautiously optimistic about the upcoming CCS projects, but we will be waiting a long time to see widespread commercial use of the technology— probably until 2020. And questions about the long-term safety of CCS linger. For example, what happens to a CO2 burial site in the event of an earthquake?
But such questions are not stopping companies from investing time and money in CCS, so we can expect many more test projects like Schwarze Pump in the near future.
The earthquake question was the first thing that came to my mind. How dangerous is it really though?
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Ray - Derek McLeish of Carbon Sciences told me that an earthquake can release buried CO2 in a matter of seconds. Of course, we haven’t had the opportunity to see the full effect of this since CCS isn’t operating on a commercial scale, but it seems like bad news to use it in seismically active areas.
Lets hope it works well. It is needed in developing countries.
This is interesting to me, especially since one of its outputs is an input as well. The CO2 pumped out can be pumped back in with a measured amount of O2 to control the speed of the burning as well to optimize the amount of coal burned. The biggest problem may be finding a way cheap enough to source and transport the 02 into the system. Electrolysis isn’t really a solution, considering the energy required to split water would counteract the energy produced by the power plant.
Why does everyone want to bury the carbon dioxide and store oxygen along with the carbon and render it unavailable??
Why not break it down and release the oxygen or re-use it and burn the carbon again??
Shouldn’t concentrated carbon dioxide burn and wouldn’t filtering large amount of air from the atmosphere also filter out particulates like from wood burning stoves and dust and pollen and leave the air even cleaner than just trying to filter out the carbon dioxide??
Does carbon dioxide burn in high enough concentrations of carbon??
Can’t the carbon be used to make roads and tires and concrete blocks and bricks and pavers??
I think filtering air on an industrial scale would be a great thing and probably would even capture enough usable carbon and oxygen to make it pay for itself.
I had the opportunity to visit Schwarze Pumpe last week. The technology is promising, though at present no carbon captured at the plant is being stored underground.
In fact, while some of it is transported off-site for use in industrial application, much of the stored carbon in the onsite tanks is simply vented back into the atmosphere. The plant can store about 20 hours of carbon, after which the tanks must be purged. At full capacity the pilot plant can store 9 tons of carbon per hour.
There is at present no framework policy in place for geologic sequestration of carbon, so it should be understood that this project is primarily testing the oxyfuel process for capturing carbon, sequestration is not part of the current operation at Schwarze Pumpe - there is hope that GS may begin in saline aquifers common in northern Germany.
The pilot plant stands next to the larger 1600 megawatt lignite-fired plant at Scwarze Pumpe, but the smaller pilot plant is not connected to the grid (and thus has no electrical output) and has a thermal output of 30MW, not 300 as stated in the post. Vattenfall hopes to have a 300-500MW demonstration plant in operation (and connected to the grid) by 2015, and a full-scale 1000MW plant running by 2020.
The steam generated from the plant is sold to a nearby paper mill.
I’ve written a detailed post in the process of the oxyfuel capture process done at Schwarze Pump at: http://www.globalwarmingisreal.com/blog/2009/05/15/schwarze-pumpe-part-1-first-operational-ccs-plant-captures-carbon-will-it-lead-to-clean-coal/