Researchers examine method to reduce carbon from coal-fired plants
Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and the U.S. Department of Energy released a study this week that examines a way to reduce the release quantities of carbon dioxide from coal power plants.
Specifically, the researchers are looking at a way to speed up carbon-capturing devices to reduce carbon dioxide as well as energy costs.
“Greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide (CO2) are a significant contributor to global warming, which is a looming catastrophe,” said Chris Wilmer, assistant professor of chemical and petroleum engineering in Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering. “Developing technologies that can be retrofit onto power plants that use fossil fuels like coal so they don’t emit greenhouse gases are urgently needed.”
Wilmer’s team developed a computational modeling method that shows how metal-organic frameworks — highly porous crystalline materials embedded in a polymer microstructure — could, in effect, mop up CO2 and filter unwanted gases from coal plants.
“The exhaust of a coal power plant consists of many different gases, like nitrogen, oxygen, and CO2,” Wilmer said. “The idea is to find a ‘mop’ that strongly interacts with some of those gases and not others, so you can purify the exhaust. It works, but it’s expensive, and there is interest in creating an energy-efficient and cost-efficient technology,” Wilmer said.
Price estimates for this scrubbing process could run between $70 and $100 per ton. However, Wilmer’s process would bring costs down to less than $50 per ton of CO2 removed.
“We used a lot of computer simulations to consider millions of different carbon filtration membranes,” Wilmer said. “We identified a handful that, in principal, can capture carbon emissions more effectively and at a lower cost than current technologies.”
The Wilmer Lab \reached out to the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory for assistance as they have a strong focus on carbon capture research.
“So, we combined our expertise to produce a simulated carbon capture filter,” said Wilmer.
Researchers envision the filter to be an apartment-building-sized unit capturing exhaust from coal power plants, thereby preventing CO2 from entering the Earth’s atmosphere. The pure CO2 would come out of a different exhaust that would be pumped underground and made usable again for coal plants.
