Can CCUS Be Used Commercially?

Created By RISC | 2 years ago

Last modified date : 2 years ago

In the last article (http://bit.ly/3iRCLe3) we looked at Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS) and how it’s crucial to achieving Net-Zero by 2050. We'll now explore CCUS technology under development for CO2 capture.​

Capturing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (Direct Air Capture) is much more difficult than trapping carbon at a chimney (Point-Source Capture). Carbon dioxide is colorless, odorless, shapeless, and dynamic. We can't tell it apart from other gases. There’s also about 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or 400 parts out of 1,000,000 parts of air, which is very small.​

Despite the difficulty of the task, researchers have developed technology to remove carbon dioxide from the air both in the lab and at factories.​

Carbon Engineering, a Canadian company, is developing a technology to capture carbon dioxide in the air by using an exhaust fan. Potassium hydroxide (KOH) acts as an adsorbent forming calcium carbonate (CaCO3) preventing carbon from being released back into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide captured will be used as a feedstock for other valuable hydrocarbons.​

Extracting carbon dioxide from calcium carbonate requires 900 C to react with green hydrogen obtained through electrolysis. (This is a method of producing hydrogen that emits no CO2 into the atmosphere.) The end result is gasoline or fuel.​

As we can see, the entire process requires a lot of energy, from carbon dioxide capture and release to hydrogen production and system control. To reduce carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, renewable energy sources must be used instead of fossil fuels.​

Carbon Engineering is constructing a high-efficiency CO2 capture plant. The world's highest carbon dioxide level is 1,000,000 tons/year, with some of the captured carbon dioxide being permanently stored in underground rock layers. Another component will be used to boost crude oil production (enhanced oil recovery) by injecting a small amount of carbon dioxide into oil wells to push crude oil out of the wells. Reducing net carbon emissions to zero would not be impossible if more large-scale carbon dioxide capture plants were built around the world.​

Story by: Supunnapang Raksawong, Materials Researcher in Sustainable Building Material, RISC ​

​References:​
https://carbonengineering.com/​
Noah McQueen et al. 2021. A review of direct air capture (DAC): scaling up commercial technologies and innovating for the future. Prog. Energy. 3 032001​