Carbon Capture Technology Techniques

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.