Carbon dioxide 'scrubber' captures greenh...(tricity from a coal-fired power plant fo...)
tricity from a coal-fired power plant, for every unit of electricity you used to operate the capture machine, you'd be capturing 10 times as much CO2 as the power plant emitted making that much electricity," Keith says.
The U of C team has devised a new way to apply a chemical process derived from the pulp and paper industry cut the energy cost of air capture in half, and has filed two provisional patents on their end-to-end air capture system.
The technology is still in its early stage, Keith stresses. "It now looks like we could capture CO2 from the air with an energy demand comparable to that needed for CO2 capture from conventional power plants, although costs will certainly be higher and there are many pitfalls along the path to commercialization."
Nevertheless, the relatively simple, reliable and scalable technology that Keith and his team developed opens the door to building a commercial-scale plant.
Richard Branson, head of Virgin Group, has offered a $25-million prize for anyone who can devise a system to remove the equivalent of one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide or more every year from the atmosphere for at least a decade.
Keith and his team's research this summer, which included an outdoor test of their capture tower in McMahon Stadium in Calgary as a dramatic setting, is featured in an episode of Discovery Channel's new "Project Earth" series on television.
The series has the largest budget of any in Discovery Channel's history, and it may attract a global viewership of more than 100 million. The episode on Keith's research isn't scheduled to be broadcast in Canada until the second Friday of January 2009, but it has already aired in the U.S. and is available on Discovery Channel's website (http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/project-earth/project-earth.html ); click on "Episodes."
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| Contact: Mark Lowey mlowey@ucalgary.ca 403-210-8659 University of Calgary Source:Eurekalert |
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