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DOE funds carbon dioxide usage research Projects selected for grants will develop, test new ways of creating useful products from CO2 emitted by coal-fired power stations ALAN BAILEY Petroleum News
The Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy is issuing grants totaling $5.9 million to seven projects investigating novel ways of using carbon dioxide captured from coal-fired power plant exhaust, DOE announced Feb. 22. Each project will contribute to at least 20 percent of the project cost, the agency said.
Presumably the idea is to find means of improving the economics of carbon capture from coal burning plants by finding marketable uses for the carbon dioxide waste. Carbon dioxide is a commodity chemical with many commercial applications, such as enhanced oil recovery in oil fields, and the manufacture of products such as fuels and chemicals, DOE said.
In addition to the conversion of carbon dioxide to usable products, the projects will explore ways of partially offsetting the cost of carbon capture, or the use of carbon dioxide in situations where high-volume applications such as enhanced oil recovery may not be optimal, DOE said.
Three areas of interest The selected projects come within three areas of interest: biological-based uses for carbon dioxide; mineralization through the use of carbon dioxide in combination with industrial wastes; and novel physical and chemical process for the beneficial use of carbon dioxide.
One project, a project to be conducted by the University of Kentucky Research Foundation, will address a biological-based process by developing a means of converting carbon dioxide from coal-fired flue gas to bioplastics, chemicals and fuels using carbon dioxide capture by micro-algae. The project team anticipates investigating the use of a combination of a photo-bioreactor and a pond cultivation process to decrease the cost of algae cultivation for the process, while also developing a strategy for maximizing the value obtained from the resulting algal biomass.
A project addressing potential mineralization will be conducted by the University of California. This project will develop and evaluate a process for using exhaust gas from coal combustion in combination with waste from iron and steel processing to produce a construction material comparable to traditional Portland cement-based concrete.
Novel processes Five projects seek novel processes for the beneficial uses of carbon dioxide.
The University of Delaware will develop and test a two-stage electrolyzer process for converting carbon dioxide flue gas into alcohols such as ethanol and propanol.
The Gas Technology Institute will develop a process that uses high-energy electron beams to break chemical bonds and, hence, produce valuable chemicals such as acetic acid and methanol from carbon dioxide.
The Gas Technology Institute is also going to try a new catalytic reactor process for the production of methane, and hence synthetic gas, from waste carbon dioxide. The catalytic reactor for dry reforming of the methane consists of nano-engineered catalysts deposited on hollow fibers.
In an effort to convert carbon dioxide to fuel, TDA Research Inc. will develop a catalytic process for the conversion of carbon dioxide to synthetic gas. A researcher in TDA explained to Petroleum News that a renewable energy source would power the process, thus using renewable energy to convert carbon dioxide to a useful product.
And Southern Research will investigate the synthesis of light olefins such as ethylene and propylene from coal-fired flue gas. The process involves the use of novel nano-engineered catalysts.
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