EnergyHarvesting carbon dioxide to produce electricity
Electric power-generating stations worldwide release about twelve billion tons of CO2 annually from combustion of coal, oil, and natural gas. Home and commercial heating produces another eleven billion tons. Researchers developed a technology which would make the CO2 react with water or other liquids and, with further processing, produce a flow of electrons that make up electric current.
A new method for producing electricity from carbon dioxide could be the start of a classic trash-to-treasure story for the troublesome greenhouse gas, scientists are reporting.
Described in an article in American Chemical Society’s (ACS) journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters, the method uses CO2 from electric power plant and other smokestacks as the raw material for making electricity.
An ACS release reports that Bert Hamelers, Ph.D., and colleagues explain that electric power-generating stations worldwide release about twelve billion tons of CO2 annually from combustion of coal, oil, and natural gas.
Home and commercial heating produces another eleven billion tons. Smokestack gas from a typical coal-fired plant contains about 10 percent CO2, which not only goes to waste, but is a key contributor to global warming. Hamelers’s team sought a way to change that trash into a treasure.
They describe technology which would make the CO2 react with water or other liquids and, with further processing, produce a flow of electrons that make up electric current. It could produce about 1,570 billion kilowatts of additional electricity annually if used to harvest CO2 from power plants, industry, and residences. This is about 400 times the annual electrical output of the Hoover Dam. Like that dam and other hydroelectric power facilities, that massive additional amount of electricity would be produced without adding more CO2 to the atmosphere, Hamelers pointed out.
The research was funded by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, the European Regional Development Fund, the Province of Fryslân, the City of Leeuwarden, the EZ/Kompas program of the “Samenwerkingsverband Noord-Nederland” and the European Union Seventh Framework Program.
— Read more in H. V. M. Hamelers et al., “Harvesting Energy from CO2 Emissions,” Environmental Science and Technology Letters, Article ASAP (23 July 2013) (DOI: 10.1021/ez4000059)
