Clean Coal Is Back on the Drawing Board

I suspected coal fired power would be a dead-end over the next four years. According to Wired.com not so much. In fact the Bush Administration's start towards "clean coal" via Carbon Sequestration is being continued with a future-gen CO2 capture project.

Just to get my enviro-street-cred 'I told you so' in as early as possible. How much you want to bet there is a major MTBE type problem with Carbon Sequestration that the brilliant engineers, chemists, and policy wonks failed to see? I just see deep well injection of anything and expect either sci-fi style earth quakes or Green Peace fundraising aquifers being effected.

I don't have any scientific basis for this. Just experience and a gut feeling. Critics please remember that I'm usually on the other side of this tech debate. Regardless, something about CO2 Sequestration just doesn't fit right.

Scientific America has a good article which does a great job of explaining the subject simply and in depth. What separates this deep injection method is the capture and mineralization (note: I don't know if that's even a real word) of the CO2 with surrounding geology.

A snippet from the article that gets right to the point:

The storage seems to be long term as well; the sequestered gas doesn’t just sit in the rock waiting for a chance to escape. Over decades it dissolves into the brine that shares the pore space or, over longer time spans, forms carbonate minerals with the surrounding rock, Hovorka notes. In fact, when she tried to pump CO₂ out of her test site using natural gas extraction techniques, the attempts failed completely.

It's is an interesting science. But I see the more promising technologies being an approach to use the CO2 productively as a resource. I don't see dumping CO2 underground ever surviving as a long term strategy.

The activists and policy people I've met would fight this approach as hard and long as any other industry approach to simplify a reduction in pollution. Capture or dilution rarely are acceptable to true environmentalists. The only solution they accept (and the only one usually settled upon) is ultimately less pollution period.

This is a short term approach that no-doubt will work for petroleum and natural gas producers. Beyond those with capital experience in drilling deep holes though I don't see this as anything close to an acceptable solution for CO2 reduction by 2050 (the target year I hear policy wonks pointing to).

Algea from city waste. A common idea actually going forward.

In biofuels there are few unique ideas. What really constitutes a breakthrough (much like artistic projects) isn't the concept but finding a patron to move a project from the drawing board to demonstration.

Reuters UK reports a Dutch experiment going forward. Dutch biotechnology firm Ingrepro is the project developer moving waste streams into biomass.

"The waste of biomethane (biogas) plants has very rich nutrients left over. At the moment they just pump it to the river or throw it away -- but we say next to these biomethane plants you need to build algal ponds to grow biomass."

What I like about this is the co-locate with an existing methane recovery program. The fact that you already have an existing successful energy project sweetens the deal. In a future where CO2 off-set projects are going to be looking for easy to utilize methane to capture I see this as a nifty model to move algae projects forward as well.

So if the capital costs of a algae project are covered by an existing methane project with experienced technical staff capable of managing an algal operation that only leaves the cash value of monetizing the algae biomass. Ingrepro claims their market will be jet fuel.

CO2 + Sunlight = Liquid Fuels

Saw this bit of news over at Wired.com.

Described as "Sunlight to Petrol" or S2P, this project essentially reverses the combustion process, recovering the building blocks of hydrocarbons. This technology has been demonstrated to create methanol and gasoline. On the drawing board this technology can make a host of other liquid fuels as well.

Originally conceived as a way to generate hydrogen the research took another turn recently. Moving from steam as a feedstock (the source for hydrogen) to CO2. The research and development work is being done at the Sandia National Laboratory. Their press release on this technology is available here.

According to the Wired article this is not a new concept. In fact moving CO2 to CO and then forcing hydrogen into the mix to make a hydrocarbon has been around for some time. The technology and process is described below:

The prototype will be about the size and shape of a beer keg. It will contain 14 cobalt ferrite rings, each about one foot in diameter and turning at one revolution per minute. An 88-square meter solar furnace will blast sunlight into the unit, heating the rings to about 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature, cobalt ferrite releases oxygen. When the rings cool to about 2,000 degrees, they're exposed to CO2.

Since the cobalt ferrite is now missing oxygen, it snatches some from the CO2, leaving behind just carbon monoxide -- a building block for making hydrocarbons -- that can then be used to make methanol or gasoline. And with the cobalt ferrite restored to its original state, the device is ready for another cycle.

Fuels like methanol and gasoline are combinations of hydrogen and carbon that are relatively easy to synthesize, Stechel said. Methanol is the easiest, and that's where they will start, but gasoline could also be made.

The team researching this project are looking to field it in connection with coal fired electricity. This is the market these researchers forsee for the technology. The target market being a CO2 scrubbing application that creates a usable off-take of liquid fuels.

Yet another technology that requires CO2 be regulated to be viable in the US. Seems a great deal of smart people are betting on this assumption. I seem to be seeing alot of those these days. Makes you wonder if all these big DOE dependent mucky-mucks know something I don't.

Asia Looks to Algae for CO2 Sequestration

Covered at Wired.com, and reported by the Associated Press.

Asian scientists are looking at seaweed farming as a potent tool for carbon sequestration. The article covers the basics. Seaweed grows fast, seaweed is already used in food production, seaweed has a good deal of potential as a next generation biofuel feedstock, and seaweed may take a lot of energy to harvest.

What makes this proposed algae use different than the others I've posted? This is done in the ocean and not in a closed system. So instead of a pure, scientifically controlled strains of algae they would just go for whatever takes off in the Ocean. Not exactly a measurable sure bet beyond the fact that CO2 will be used in the growth of the algae strain that takes off.

Not mentioned. The fact that large stands of algae could cure dead zones effected at the mouth of large rivers (the Mississippi and gulf of Mexico). This same use of algae could have longterm effects on the ecosystems they are grown in (meaning potential longterm environmental concerns).

Something about algae always reminds me of nuke power. Easy to understand, a great deal of potential, but for some reason the true commercial projects never seem to happen. Something about this proposal just looks like a litigation magnet.

Glomalin: What likely makes switchgrass so special

The USDA has a great easy to read article which covers the basics of glomalin as it relates to plants. According to the USDA article it turns out that switchgrass has higher glomalin activity which might explain its robust growth and better carbon gobbling ablity over other crops like corn.

I don't know the science at all beyond a basic level but even for a layperson like myself I can see the potential. If we could better understand glomalin's function or influencing factors we might be able to boost the carbon feasting ablities of other crops.

Glomalin is a sugar protein excreted by soil fungi ands serves an additional role as a facilitator of water and nutrient uptake into the roots of plants. I have seen presentations where they talk about plants, fungi, and symbiotic relationships before but this is the first study I've seen where they might influence the amount of biomass to be had by a plant.

Said best by Linda Tokarz who wrote the article at the USDA:

"Glomalin may be partly responsible for the ability of switchgrass to store more soil carbon than corn—and to store it deeper, so it’s less likely to be lost to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Thus, glomalin might not only help biofuel crops grow and flourish under adverse conditions like drought, but also close the carbon cycle by storing carbon released as carbon dioxide during the burning of biofuels for energy."


The picture above is a microscopic view of glomalin taken from the USDA article page. This picture and further reading are better explained at the USDA page.

Algae:. First biodiesel, then ethanol, now its the silver bullet hope for CO2 sequestration.

The US Department of Energy just put out a release about algae research showing amazing promise. Exciting stuff it turns out as they have mapped a sequence of genes responsible for the conversion of CO2 into sequestered carbon (as well as a host of other potential applications).

"The genome analysis of a tiny green alga has uncovered hundreds of genes that are uniquely associated with carbon dioxide capture and generation of biomass. Among the 15,000-plus genes revealed in the study are those that encode the structure and function of the specialized organelle that houses the photosynthetic apparatus, the chloroplast, which is responsible for converting light to chemical energy. The genome also provides a glimpse back through time to the last common ancestor of plants and animals."

This research is also well discussed in the most recent copy of Science magazine. I took a look at the abstract. To much science for my limited attention span but still enough to spark your imagination.
Shown is an MIT Algae Bioreactor. If you've ever wondered what one looked like, here it is. Pretty much they all look like variations of the same thing. Similar to older solar systems only green. For more about MIT's bioreactor shown and a YouTube interview go to this Sustainable Design Update post.