For many centuries of years carbon capture has been in use. The
oil and gas industries have been the longest users of carbon capture. For the
last decades the oil and gas industries have depended on carbon capture to
improve oil and gas recovery.
Presently, majority of the research concentrates on carbon capture
at fossil fuel-powered energy production C02
capture plant, it is the source of man-made CO2 emissions. Many of these
power plants depend on coal to produce energy, and the combustion of coal emits
CO2 in to the atmosphere. Due to this, some researchers have foreseen a future
where all new developed plants will incorporate carbon capture.
The production and storage of carbon capture requires three main
steps. These include trapping and separating the CO2 from rest of the other
gases, transporting the captured CO2 to a storage place, and storing the CO2 a
distance further from the atmosphere-this can be underground or deep in the
ocean. So, let’s learn more about the trapping and separation process.
First, carbon is extracted from the plant source in three basic
ways –post combustion, precombustion and oxy-fuel combustion step. Fossil fuel
plants emits power through burning of fossil fuel, which produces heat that
turns into steam. It is the steam that turns turbines connected to an
electricity generator. The process that turn the turbines is called combustion.
Looking at post-combustion carbon capture step, the CO2 is trapped
after burning of fossil fuel. The burning of fossil fuel leads to the
production of flue gases, this gas include CO2, water vapor, nitrogen dioxides
and sulfur dioxides. During the post-combustion process, CO2 is separated and
captured from the flue gases which result from the combustion of fossil fuel.
This process is presently used to eliminate CO2 from the natural gas. One huge
benefit with using this process is that it enables one to retrofit older power
plants. Post-combustion carbon capture is also used to prevent 80 to 90 percent
of a power plants carbon productions from getting into the atmosphere. However,
this process calls for a lot of energy to compress the gas sufficient for
transport.
With Precombustion process, CO2 is confined before the fossil fuel
is burned. This is to mean that CO2 gets trapped before other flue gases. Coal,
natural gas and oil is heated in pure oxygen , resulting in a composition of
carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The composition is then heated in a catalytic
converter with steam, which later produces more hydrogen together with carbon
monoxide. The gases get fed into the bottom of a flask. Gases in the flask will
naturally start to rise, hence a chemical by the name amine is poured into the
top. Amine binds with the CO2, falls to the bottom of the flask.
The hydrogen will proceed to rise up and out of the flask. Next,
the amine mixture is heated. Thus, the CO2 rises to the top to be collected
while amine drops to the bottom to be reused. Excess hydrogen is used for other
energy production processes. Precombustion carbon capture process is presently
used for natural gas, and provides a larger concentration of CO2 than the
post-combustion. Like post-combustion, precombustion carbon capture prevents 80
to 90 percent of a power plant’s emissions from penetrating the atmosphere.
Oxy-fuel combustion carbon captures process, power plants burn
fossil fuels in oxygen. The result is a combination of steam and CO2. The
carbon dioxide and steam gets separated by cooling and compressing the gas
steam. The oxygen needed by this technique increases the cost, but researchers
are coming up with new techniques to cut the cost down. Oxy-fuel combustion in Delta Recamier helps prevent 90 percent
of a power plant’s emissions from getting into the atmosphere.