Spotlight on Natural Resources Canada, (Part 1)
Institutional Feature, September 2010 (Page 2 of 3)
One of the more unusual projects they've undertaken is the Drake Landing Solar Community (http://www.dlsc.ca/), a planned neighborhood in Okotoks, Alberta, that is North America's first large-scale seasonal storage solar system—solar energy collected in the summer is stored underground for the community's use in the winter. In May 2010, it was announced that 80% of Drake Landing's energy needs were met by this solar power.
John Marrone, the Director General of the Ottawa Research Centre, says that projects like Drake Landing are "moving us towards what we think is possible in the not-too-distant future, which is zero-energy communities on a net basis. This doesn't mean 'off-grid,' because centralized systems provide robustness, but on an annual basis, it's possible to conceive of homes, neighborhoods, and even communities generating as much energy locally as they are consuming."
CONQUERING CLIMATE CHANGE BY CAPTURING CARBON DIOXIDE
NRCan is a listed institution on several highly cited papers in Essential Science Indicators dealing with carbon capture and storage (CCS). It's no wonder the papers are highly cited; CCS is of great interest to governments and industry alike, as they look for solutions to climate change.
"This is a major technology in Canada," Marrone stresses. "It's hard to overestimate the value of CCS for our country and for the world. It's not the only technology that will help us solve climate change, but without it, it will be very, very difficult."
Why is CCS so important? As Marrone explains, Canada is rich in fossil fuel energy, but it is also one of the world's biggest users of this same energy. "There are many processes that require us to use fossil fuels and carbon-containing fuels, and that's not going to go away. Many of our engines of production, many of our chemical processes, require these fuels in order to continue producing. CCS is the one major area of technology that allows that form of economic activity to continue and yet not be contributing to climate change."
The main idea behind CCS is right there in the name: carbon dioxide is captured in the various processes during which it is generated, and then safely stored back underground. Some of the basic technology to do this already exists, and it's just a matter of scaling things up for CCS purposes.
"We strive to always be working on the leading edge. We don't want to repeat work that's already been done somewhere in the world; we want to maintain an international high caliber of research capacity within the organization."
--Geoff Munro
"For instance," says Marrone, "gasification has been around for 100 years, but never for the purposes of capturing carbon dioxide. So now we're trying to make that very old technology do something totally new: to be able to gasify coal to produce electricity, capture the carbon dioxide, and then store that carbon dioxide underground." For gasification, they're looking for more effective ways of separating the gas—to get a stream of pure hydrogen on one side and a stream of pure carbon dioxide on the other.
The problem with making this old technology do new tricks right now is that the system is far from optimal. "It's very inelegant. I've even heard it described as 'bolted together,' so you can imagine what that looks like!" Marrone jokes. "It's not very efficient and it is very expensive, so the international community, Canada included, is dedicated to reducing the costs of CSS."
About 80% of the cost issues are on the capture side, so NRCan and its partners in academia and industry are focusing much of their efforts on more integrated and effective ways of capturing carbon dioxide. One important area of R&D is coming up with less toxic, more effective post-combustion capture methods.
As Marrone explains it, "Post-combustion capture is the kind of thing that you do when you put a facility at the tail end of a power plant, just before the smoke stack. You've used the energy, and now you're just trying to clean up the gas and capture it. In those types of technologies, the cost is high because of the cost of the various chemicals that are used, and even some of those chemicals have some environmental challenges of their own, so we're trying to look for more effective ways of dealing with that."
Marrone and his colleagues are also looking for the effective use of oxy-fuel combustion. "We've had a consortium with industry for about 15 years now," he explains, "We've developed these technologies—the various burners, the recycling strategies for gas—to try to control the flame temperature and end up with a very highly concentrated stream of carbon dioxide. If we could remove the nitrogen up front so we're burning the coal with pure oxygen, after the burning we'd end up with highly concentrated carbon dioxide, and that would be a lot easier to capture."
But one of the biggest expense issues with CCS is the parasitic losses the technology imparts: when you add CCS technology to a power plant, you're adding energy-consuming equipment. According to Marrone, for every 150 megawatts of power a power plant without CCS produces, one with CSS will only produce 100 megawatts a power, a loss of 50 megawatts. So another goal of NRCan is to reduce these losses.
NRCan recently announced a new carbon dioxide research facility, a place where scientists will study ways to clean impurities out of the gas at various stages of compression, as well as the application of pressure throughout the process.
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On the latter point, Marrone provides an example of how this will cut costs, "If we have oxy-fuel, we produce the oxygen with a facility that compresses the air, separates the oxygen from the nitrogen, and then the very next thing we do in most plants is reduce the pressure so that it can be used in the boiler, only to be recompressed at the tail end for carbon dioxide capture and storage. That doesn't make any sense—it's a lot of lost energy, and so we're looking at ways of maintaining the pressure and recapturing some of the losses."
Although much of Marrone's area is concerned with the capture end of the technology, NRCan is also dealing with storage. After all, what's the point in capturing the carbon dioxide if it can't be stored?
"There are other labs working on this storage aspect and what they call MMV—monitoring, measurement, and verification," Marrone explains. "Obviously, we want to be absolutely certain we know how to store carbon dioxide and understand the geology under which it can be stored safely for long periods of time. And then, of course, there is all the monitoring that a government regulation typically has to deal with throughout the years after storage."
NRCan is not going it alone on this research by any means. They are a strong presence in the international community and have working partnerships with industry and other governments.
Marrone elaborates: "We are part of the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum (CSLF), the Asia Pacific Partnership (my group is chairing about three of the task forces), we're part of the International Energy Agency on many levels—we're in a large number of their working groups, in particular those on greenhouse gases and clean coal. We're pretty much switched in to all of the international communities. These organizations are frequently instructed by the G8 to look at something for them and report back, and we participate.
"But when you're talking about partnerships, the kind that help us in the technology development are those technology providers—those companies that are actually in the business of making and selling things that will work in capturing carbon dioxide and storing it safely—as well as with the technology adopters, like the utility companies. Those are the kind of partnerships we have in our consortia. Industry plays a big part.
"More recently, we've been developing more strategic partnerships with the US through joint projects. For instance, we're now looking at starting up a few projects with the US Department of Energy labs through the Clean Energy Dialogue, and they of course have very large programs, which could greatly accelerate the development of technology for Canada."