I have deep reservations about co2 capture technology, mostly because I am afraid of what will happen if it were to all suddenly leak out. But I feel it also makes people feel like they simply can continue to burn fossil fuels, global warming, or no global warming, the burning of carbon based fuels is highly problematic (peek oil, ocean acidification, wars over fuels, etc). The inauguration of the first European pilot integrating the entire process of capturing and storing CO2, the main greenhouse gas responsible for the planet’s global warming, will be held on the Lacq site in France.
Air Liquide is the technological partner of this industrial project operated by Total.
CO2 capture, transport and storage are promising approaches, pointed up by international experts, to preserving the planet and helping to fight climate change. These processes aid to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of industrial facilities that use fossil fuels (fuel oil, gas or coal) such as power plants, steel mills, cement factories, oil refineries…
Air Liquide is contributing to this project by supplying the technology of CO2 capture by means of oxycombustion. This process consists in replacing the air in an industrial boiler by pure oxygen. The fumes obtained when they come out of the boiler are then very concentrated in CO2 (90%).
In the framework of this project, Air Liquide has developed burners designed for this technology and supplies the oxygen needed for oxycombustion through an on-site unit and the CO2 drying process, required for transport.
This CO2 is then transported to the Rousse geological storage site 27 km from the Lacq plant via pipeline, then injected 4,500 m deep into this former gas field.
Over the next two years, the industrial project plans to trap about 120,000 tons of carbon dioxide. This quantity of CO2 is equivalent to what is discharged by 40,000 vehicles during the same time period.
Your reservations about the CO2 capture and storage concepts is well intended, and well, nobody really knows if the current methods being tried (including the oxy-fuel method being explored by Air Liquide) is sustainable.
But we have to face the fact that coal will be the mainstay fuel for power production for many decades to come and we have to have some medium term measures to control the amount of CO2 emitted.
So, like it or not, carbon capture and storage is a devil we will have to live with. What we can try to do is to explore if there are more environment friendly and sustainable methods of doing this.
This is what we do at our site PowerPlantCCS ( http://www.powerplantccs.com ), where we focus on some of the new , more sustainable research efforts being undertaken for CCS