If you don't take the lead in clean energy research, someone else would and did. The United States has the world's largest coal reserves, but it is China that is leading the advances in carbon capture.
"The buzz began in late 2009, after officials at the government-owned Huaneng Group opened a facility that captures some of the carbon dioxide emitted by the existing giant 1,320-megawatt coal-fired Shidongkou power station. The system scrubs roughly 120,000 tonnes of CO2 a year from 3% of the facility's flue gases, but what has caught everybody's eye is the cost that Huaneng quotes: a mere US$30â35 per tonne of CO2, including the further expense of purifying the captured gas for use in the food and beverage industry.
That is far below the $100 or more typically estimated for first-generation projects to retrofit existing power plants for carbon capture and storage (CCS) in the United States and Europe
Huaneng has not yet revealed all the technical details of its CCS process. Huang Bin, head of Huaneng's Research and Development Division in Beijing, says that the company has made unspecified changes in the design of the plant and the chemistry of the solvent, which increased the energy efficiency of the system by 11â14% and reduced the cost of installation by a factor of 10 per tonne of CO2.
"Huaneng is using a known process, but they seem to have found a way to do it much more economically," says David Mohler, chief technology officer of Duke Energy, an electric utility company based in Charlotte, North Carolina. "What's the secret sauce?" he adds."
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110118/full/469276a.html
"The buzz began in late 2009, after officials at the government-owned Huaneng Group opened a facility that captures some of the carbon dioxide emitted by the existing giant 1,320-megawatt coal-fired Shidongkou power station. The system scrubs roughly 120,000 tonnes of CO2 a year from 3% of the facility's flue gases, but what has caught everybody's eye is the cost that Huaneng quotes: a mere US$30â35 per tonne of CO2, including the further expense of purifying the captured gas for use in the food and beverage industry.
That is far below the $100 or more typically estimated for first-generation projects to retrofit existing power plants for carbon capture and storage (CCS) in the United States and Europe
Huaneng has not yet revealed all the technical details of its CCS process. Huang Bin, head of Huaneng's Research and Development Division in Beijing, says that the company has made unspecified changes in the design of the plant and the chemistry of the solvent, which increased the energy efficiency of the system by 11â14% and reduced the cost of installation by a factor of 10 per tonne of CO2.
"Huaneng is using a known process, but they seem to have found a way to do it much more economically," says David Mohler, chief technology officer of Duke Energy, an electric utility company based in Charlotte, North Carolina. "What's the secret sauce?" he adds."
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110118/full/469276a.html
