Babcock & Wilcox researchers in Barberton say they’ve hit a milestone that was six years in the making.
And as a result, B&W Power Generation Group’s prototype technology that removes the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plant emissions will soon get a close-to-real-world test down South.
B&W Power Generation says it will be the first company at the Department of Energy’s National Carbon Capture Center to test a highly specialized solvent that can remove carbon dioxide from power plant smokestacks. The company has between 15 and 20 people devoted to the project.
B&W is trucking 5,000 gallons of the chemical, which it calls OptiCap, to the Wilsonville, Ala., facility. The solvent will be used for three months in what the facility calls the Post-Combustion Carbon Capture Center — meaning the solvent removes carbon dioxide after the coal is burned. While B&W has paid the technology development expenses to date, the testing at the National Carbon Capture Center will be funded in part by the federal government.
B&W has been working at least six years to develop processes, including mixing and testing solvents, that can remove carbon dioxide from coal flue gas, said George Farthing, technical consultant at the Barberton R&D facility.
The work is being done at what B&W calls its Regenerable Solvent Absorption Technology facility.
The OptiCap solvent developed there, when it comes into contact with the smokestack gases, bonds with and “captures” the carbon dioxide and is then piped away. The solvent then undergoes another process that removes the carbon dioxide. The gas can then be stored in places such as deep underground so that it does not enter the atmosphere.
“You can prevent the CO2 from impacting the climate system,” Farthing said.
Conventional scrubbing processes, when applied to removing carbon dioxide from a coal-fired power plant, are quite expensive and use a lot of energy, he said.
“We are trying to find more efficient, lower cost ways to do that,” Farthing said.
B&W’s process scrubs carbon dioxide gas in a similar way that power plants now use “scrubbers” to remove the pollutant sulfur dioxide from coal-fired smokestacks.
“With CO2, the quantities are so large that there isn’t a solvent available that we can afford to throw away,” Farthing said. The OptiCap can remove about 90 percent of the carbon dioxide from the smokestack emissions.
B&W’s process also means the solvent can be reused over and over again at a power plant, Farthing said.
The researchers at B&W have been looking at and developing the right blend of chemicals, Farthing said.
“We here are not inventing new molecules, necessarily. But we’re looking at different kind of blends of existing chemicals and chemicals we could conceivably use in the process,” Farthing said.
The OptiCap mixture that B&W developed has a good balance trading off being able to absorb the gas while not using excessive energy in the process, he said.
“Of all the ones we’ve looked at, we think this is the best,” Farthing said. “That’s why we’re moving it on to the demonstration at the National Carbon Capture Center.”
The OptiCap technology will be used to remove carbon dioxide from flue gases emitted by the Gaston electric power plant, owned by electric utility Southern Company, that is part of the National Carbon Capture Center in Wilsonville.
After the three-month-long test, B&W and others will review how well OptiCap performed.
“We need to come back here and figure out what it all means,” said Christopher Poling, principal engineer at B&W Power Generation.
They hope the process will prove that OpticCap has the benefits B&W researchers believe it has, he said.
And then B&W will seek a larger, commercial-size demonstration involving a utility power plant, Poling said. “That’s something that would be expensive but that’s what we need to happen in order to have this technology roll out.”
B&W has committed a significant number of people and capital to the carbon-capture technology, Poling said.
“Our work to date at the [Barberton] research center has all been paid by the company,” Farthing said. “It’s been a major development effort at the company for many years now.”
Jim Mackinnon can be reached at 330-996-3544 or jmackinnon@thebeaconjournal.com
