New Concept for Zero Emission Natural Gas Power Generation

[BillTre]

Science mag news article on a new electrical power plant being set-up by a start-up.
It burns natural gas with pure oxygen and runs turbines with CO₂.
It makes water rather than using it and is in theory close to competitive economically. .

Sounds good to me, but I'm no engineer.

 

[anorlunda]

You used the right word, concept. The article says nothing about them actually having done the R&D to build even a pilot project.

For decades, engineers have worked on Brayton cycles—thermodynamic loops that take advantage of the properties of supercritical fluids, which could be air or CO2.

You may want to ask yourself why the people promoting this are smarter than all those other engineers. It doesn't sound likely that none of the others looked at CO2 as the fluid.

 

[russ_watters]

Science mag news article on a new electrical power plant being set-up by a start-up.
It burns natural gas with pure oxygen and runs turbines with CO₂.
It makes water rather than using it and is in theory close to competitive economically. .

Sounds good to me, but I'm no engineer.

This is nonsense! The special sauce in this isn't that they don't produce CO2 but rather that they assume someone else will figure out how to sequester it for them! There is a cartoon somewhere on PF where an "inventor" figures out a fabulous invention and displays it on a blackboard, but leaves the key part blank, for someone else to figure out. It's exactly like that!

Very disappointing from Science.

 

[CWatters]

The above is very harsh in my opinion. For example they clearly have done enough research to prove it works or they would not have got funding to build a 25MW demonstration plant under construction.

I'd rather we didn't have to do CCS but this project does at least appear to make it a lot cheaper. I'd rather we did CCS than continue to build thousands of conventional gas power stations that just release the CO2.