Alstom has joined with Canadian power company Transalta to construct a carbon-dioxide capture and storage (CCS) demonstration facility at one of Transalta’s coal-fired power stations.
The facility, named Project Pioneer, has received more than €500m (£455m) of funding from the Canadian and
Project Pioneer will be located at the Keephills 3 power plant, a joint venture between Transalta and Capital Power.
It will use Alstom’s Chilled Ammonia Process to capture CO2 emissions.
According to Alstom, the process is a potentially lower-cost solution for CCS compared with existing methods.
Philippe Joubert, president of Alstom Power, said: ‘The Canadian government’s choice of Alstom and Transalta confirms the recognition of Alstom’s technology leadership in the capture of CO2.
‘The significant size of this project demonstrates that we are no longer in the testing phase, but are ready for commercialisation.
‘The lessons learned from Project Pioneer, as well as other carbon capture and storage projects worldwide, will allow Alstom to answer to its engagement to commercialise its carbon-capture technology.’
The project is expected to be the first in the world to capture and store CO2 at this scale, as well as being the first to have its own integrated underground-storage system.
Alstom said that the project was the last major step required to commercialise its CCS process from 2015 onwards.
Carbon capture is probably better than nothing, but it is blinkered thinking to rely on it into the future. What do we do when we are running out of storage space for the captured carbon? Perhaps we won’t ever run out, because we will have exhausted the fossil resource first.
Better to spend all this development money on genuine carbon capture: harvesting the trillions of tonnes we have already mobilised and converting that back to useable fuel for mobile consumption, where fixed resources aren’t viable.
That will require a vast energy supply: nuclear. When it’s not meeting day to day peak demand, the reserve generation capacity would be available to drive the conversion of harvested carbon from waste gas back to av-gas, diesel etc.
Thus the remnants of the original fossil resource can be safeguarded to supply higher grade applications than this asinine wastage that we still pursue in our power stations.
John Douglas
19 – x – 2009
Carbon capture is a dead duck. To capture CO2 involves capturing three times more oxygen than carbon. Capture carbon to save our planet. Use nature. Grow, convert to carbon using wasted heat, put it back into our land. The people in the Amazon knew long ago. Bio carbon is the eco-way.