A Secret Weapon Against Carbon Has Met Scientist’s Wildest Expectations
A Norwegian company developing a carbon capture technology known as Continuous Swing Adsorption Reactor (CSAR) tested its heat and vacuum pump system in a real industrial setting.
The company reports that the CSAR captured 100 kilograms of carbon dioxide per day, which is the same level of efficiency in a laboratory setting.
Because of CSAR's simple and efficient design, the tech could be retrofitted to existing flues that are currently exacerbating the climate crisis.
The negative-carbon emission economy is the holy grail of the green energy revolution. Not only does humanity need to find a way to kick its fossil fuel addiction, we also need to start sucking out the carbon that's already in the atmosphere if we have any hope of stabilizing the climate for future generations.
Researchers are hard at work developing new materials and processes that are adept at capturing carbon dioxide before it reaches the atmosphere. Recently, one new technology—developed by Norwegian scientists and engineers at the research company Stiftelsen for industriell og teknisk forskning (SINTEF)— took its first real-world test and passed with flying colors.
The underlying technology—Continuous Swing Adsorption Reactor (CSAR)—uses a heat pump and vacuum pump to efficiently capture CO2. One of CSAR's big advantages is that that both its heat pump and vacuum pump technologies use the same energy source, simplifying the process being used in many existing carbon capture technologies . This makes it particularly appealing for retrofitting existing flues that are currently burping out greenhouse gasses around the world.
"The CSAR technology utilizes two reactors in the capture process," Jan Hendrik Cloete, SINTEF research scientist, said in a press statement. "The CO2 is initially captured in the first reactor by a sorbent, which binds the gas to its surface. This binding process occurs at low temperature and generates heat. The heat is then transferred to the other reactor, where it is used to release the CO2 from the sorbent, this time at a higher temperature. The heat pump is used to transfer the heat between the reactors, while the vacuum pump assists in releasing the CO2."
Although CSAR performed well in laboratory settings, the technology needed to be tested in the wild. Over the summer, SINTEF worked with the BIR AS waste combustion plant outside Bergen, Norway. This particular plant loads up 220,000 tonnes of household waste annually to produce electricity, but this is far from clean energy because producing this waste-generated electricity creates roughly 250,000 tonnes of CO2 every year.
In a 100-hour-long test operation, the CSAR pilot demonstration captured the same amount of CO2 gas as it had in a laboratory setting. In total, this represents roughly 100 kilograms of CO2 per day, though BIR aims to build a future factory capable of capturing 100,000 kilograms of CO2 a year. SINTEF is now working on upgrades to the pilot reactor before permanently installing the machinery at a cement factory in Spain as part of an EU-funded project focused on carbon capture tech.
"Our studies have shown that the CSAR technology competes very well with technologies that utilize heat," Cloete said in a press statement. "This applies in particular if reasonably-priced electricity from renewable sources is available."
With the cost of solar technology plummeting, wind turbines producing more energy than ever before , and nuclear power entering a new age , the world's energy infrastructure is quickly becoming amenable for these game-changing carbon capture technologies.
You Might Also Like
