Washington — One of the best ways to contain and even reverse climate change is to prevent the release of greenhouse gases that trap the sun’s heat and cause temperatures to rise. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced August 25 that it will invest $41 million in that strategy over the next three years.
DOE is providing grants to 16 private-sector companies and institutions to develop ideas for “post-combustion technologies for capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from coal-fired power plants.” The projects are intended to develop a method for cleaning up emissions that is cheaper and more efficient than the methods now in use.
Today’s carbon-capture technologies create what are called “parasitic losses”: a significant portion of the energy produced by a plant becomes unavailable for utility customers because it is used to scrub the emissions.
The research DOE is underwriting will focus on technologies that can remove at least 90 percent of CO2 from emissions and increase the cost of electricity by no more than 35 percent.
“Charting a path toward clean coal is essential to achieving our goals of providing clean energy, creating American jobs and reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” said U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu. “It will also help position the United States as a leader in the global clean-energy race.”
These are among the projects that have won DOE support:
• Use of ultrasonic energy forces to dissolve CO2 into gas bubbles.
• Use of organic-based solvents to capture CO2 emissions.
• Use of rapid pressure changes to capture and release CO2.
• Use of an absorbing agent to capture emissions.
The Obama administration aspires to the deployment of a cost-effective carbon capture technology within 10 years.
For its part, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is in the process of enacting a proposed rule to enforce emissions regulations on coal-fired plants. In March, the agency announced a proposed rule to limit emissions of mercury, arsenic, chromium, nickel and acid gases. The regulation would require many power plants to install existing pollution control technologies to scrub their emissions, though more than half of the nation’s power plants have adopted these technologies voluntarily.
In announcing the proposal, EPA said the measure would prevent as many as 17,000 premature deaths and 11,000 heart attacks a year. EPA said the new standards would also provide particular health benefits for children, preventing 120,000 cases of childhood asthma symptoms and about 11,000 fewer cases of acute bronchitis among children each year. The proposed standards would also avert more than 12,000 emergency room visits and hospital admissions and 850,000 fewer days of work missed because of illness, EPA said.