Coping with carbon: a near-term strategy to limit carbon dioxide emissions from power stations

Author(s):  
Paul Breeze

Burning coal to generate electricity is one of the key sources of atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions; so, targeting coal-fired power plants offers one of the easiest ways of reducing global carbon emissions. Given that the world's largest economies all rely heavily on coal for electricity production, eliminating coal combustion is not an option. Indeed, coal consumption is likely to increase over the next 20–30 years. However, the introduction of more efficient steam cycles will improve the emission performance of these plants over the short term. To achieve a reduction in carbon emissions from coal-fired plant, however, it will be necessary to develop and introduce carbon capture and sequestration technologies. Given adequate investment, these technologies should be capable of commercial development by ca 2020.

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (10) ◽  
pp. 712-713
Author(s):  
Scott Singleton

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) and carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) are expanding at lightning speed as the world increasingly embraces the need for a carbon-neutral future. As it is described on the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) website, “CCUS is a process that captures carbon dioxide emissions from sources like coal-fired power plants and either reuses or stores it so it will not enter the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide storage in geologic formations includes oil and gas reservoirs, unmineable coal seams and deep saline reservoirs — structures that have stored crude oil, natural gas, brine and carbon dioxide over millions of years” ( https://www.energy.gov/carbon-capture-utilization-storage ). The International Energy Agency (IEA) states that “CCUS is the only group of technologies that contributes both to reducing emissions in key sectors directly and to removing CO2 to balance emissions that are challenging to avoid – a critical part of “net-zero” goals. After years of slow progress, new investment incentives and strengthened climate goals are building new momentum behind CCUS” ( https://www.iea.org/reports/ccus-in-clean-energy-transitions ).


Author(s):  
Michael O’Sullivan ◽  
Michael Gravatt ◽  
Joris Popineau ◽  
John O’Sullivan ◽  
Warren Mannington ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 1616
Author(s):  
Antonina Rita Limongi ◽  
Emanuele Viviano ◽  
Maria De Luca ◽  
Rosa Paola Radice ◽  
Giuliana Bianco ◽  
...  

The need to safeguard our planet by reducing carbon dioxide emissions has led to a significant development of research in the field of alternative energy sources. Hydrogen has proved to be the most promising molecule, as a fuel, due to its low environmental impact. Even if various methods already exist for producing hydrogen, most of them are not sustainable. Thus, research focuses on the biological sector, studying microalgae, and other microorganisms’ ability to produce this precious molecule in a natural way. In this review, we provide a description of the biochemical and molecular processes for the production of biohydrogen and give a general overview of one of the most interesting technologies in which hydrogen finds application for electricity production: fuel cells.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 7148
Author(s):  
Wenjie Zhang ◽  
Mingyong Hong ◽  
Juan Li ◽  
Fuhong Li

The implementation of green finance is a powerful measure to promote global carbon emissions reduction that has been highly valued by academic circles in recent years. However, the role of green credit in carbon emissions reduction in China is still lacking testing. Using a set of panel data including 30 provinces and cities, this study focused on the impact of green credit on carbon dioxide emissions in China from 2006 to 2016. The empirical results indicated that green credit has a significantly negative effect on carbon dioxide emissions intensity. Furthermore, after the mechanism examination, we found that the promotion impacts of green credit on industrial structure upgrading and technological innovation are two effective channels to help reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Heterogeneity analysis found that there are regional differences in the effect of green credit. In the western and northeastern regions, the effect of green credit is invalid. Quantile regression results implied that the greater the carbon emissions intensity, the better the effect of green credit. Finally, a further discussion revealed there exists a nonlinear correlation between green credit and carbon dioxide emissions intensity. These findings suggest that the core measures to promote carbon emission reduction in China are to continue to expand the scale of green credit, increase the technology R&D investment of enterprises, and to vigorously develop the tertiary industry.


Author(s):  
Zakiah Radhi Alhajji, Mohamed Elsayed Hafez Ali Zakiah Radhi Alhajji, Mohamed Elsayed Hafez Ali

Because of increased demand for electrical energy in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which has resulted in an increase in carbon dioxide emissions, the electricity system in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the largest in the Gulf region and the Arab world, with approximately 61.7 gigatons (GW) of peak demand and 89.2 gigatons (GW) of available capacity in 2018 of electricity power. It has grown rapidly over more than 20 years and has almost doubled in size since 2000. Where we observe that the total carbon dioxide emissions in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from 1990 to 2020; where shows rapid growth in emissions of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases, as it was found that CO2 emissions in 1990 amounted to 151 million metric tons compared to 2011 when it reached about 435 million metric tons, and the increase continued until 2020 when it reached about 530 million metric tons. The comprehensive study relied on time series analysis to carefully analyze the electric energy productivity rate from fossil fuels and the significant amount of carbon dioxide emissions typically resulting from promptly burning fossil fuels to naturally produce electric energy. Therefore, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, through Vision 2030 and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, looks to reduce the rate of carbon dioxide emissions in the field of electric power generation by diversifying the fuels used or replacing them with clean and renewable energy such as solar and wind energy.


Author(s):  
Jongsup Hong ◽  
Ahmed F. Ghoniem ◽  
Randall Field ◽  
Marco Gazzino

Oxy-fuel combustion coal-fired power plants can achieve significant reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, but at the cost of lowering their efficiency. Research and development are conducted to reduce the efficiency penalty and to improve their reliability. High-pressure oxy-fuel combustion has been shown to improve the overall performance by recuperating more of the fuel enthalpy into the power cycle. In our previous papers, we demonstrated how pressurized oxy-fuel combustion indeed achieves higher net efficiency than that of conventional atmospheric oxy-fuel power cycles. The system utilizes a cryogenic air separation unit, a carbon dioxide purification/compression unit, and flue gas recirculation system, adding to its cost. In this study, we perform a techno-economic feasibility study of pressurized oxy-fuel combustion power systems. A number of reports and papers have been used to develop reliable models which can predict the costs of power plant components, its operation, and carbon dioxide capture specific systems, etc. We evaluate different metrics including capital investments, cost of electricity, and CO2 avoidance costs. Based on our cost analysis, we show that the pressurized oxy-fuel power system is an effective solution in comparison to other carbon dioxide capture technologies. The higher heat recovery displaces some of the regeneration components of the feedwater system. Moreover, pressurized operating conditions lead to reduction in the size of several other critical components. Sensitivity analysis with respect to important parameters such as coal price and plant capacity is performed. The analysis suggests a guideline to operate pressurized oxy-fuel combustion power plants in a more cost-effective way.


2022 ◽  
Vol 1 (15) ◽  
pp. 71-75
Author(s):  
Dmitriy Kononov

The strategy of low-carbon development of the economy and energy of Russia provides for the introduction of a fee (tax) for carbon dioxide emissions by power plants. This will seriously affect their prospective structure and lead to an increase in electricity prices. The expected neg-ative consequences for national and energy security are great. But serious and multilateral research is needed to properly assess these strategic threats


2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 574-586
Author(s):  
Marta Bertolini ◽  
Fosca Conti

Abstract Carbon dioxide emissions are strongly related to climate change and increase of global temperature. Whilst a complete change in producing materials and energy and in traffic and transportation systems is already in progress and circular economy concepts are on working, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) and Carbon Capture and Utilisation (CCU) represent technically practicable operative strategies. Both technologies have main challenges related to high costs, so that further advanced research is required to obtain feasible options. In this article, the focus is mainly on CCU using microalgae that are able to use CO2 as building block for value-added products such as biofuels, EPS (Extracellular Polymeric Substances), biomaterials and electricity. The results of three strains (UTEX 90, CC 2656, and CC 1010) of the microalgal organism Chlamydomonas reinhardtii are discussed. The results about ideal culture conditions suggest incubation temperature of 30 °C, pH between 6.5 and 7.0, concentrations of acetate between 1.6 and 2.3 g L–1 and of ammonium chloride between 0.1 and 0.5 g L–1, the addition of glucose This green microalga is a valid model system to optimize the production of biomass, carbohydrates and lipids.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (9) ◽  
pp. 178-195
Author(s):  
Aliyu Alhaji Jibrilla

This study empirically evaluates whether Green House Gases (GHGs) significantly increase with the rising population and urban growth in Nigeria. In addition, the study examine whether the energy demand also influences Nigerian contribution of global pollution emissions. The results of the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) cointegration test indicated long-run and stable relationships among the variables. For affluence, we find evidence that, in the long run, domestic per capita income significantly increases carbon dioxide emissions and then falls after a certain extreme point, providing evidence of an inverted EKC hypothesis in Nigeria. The EKC finding was further supported by appropriate inverted U test. The results also demonstrated that both urbanisation and population change do not have a long term effect on emissions; although urbanisation seems to significantly raise emissions in the short-run.  Energy demand has been found to have a significantly positive elasticity effect on carbon dioxide emissions both in the long- and short-run. The short-run Granger causality results indicate that, all variables make a short-run adjustment to correct any deviation from the long-run equilibrium. In addition, analysis of the error correction models reveals that all of the variables contribute to their stable long-run relationship.


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