New CO2CRC carbon capture project commissioned
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) research has taken a major step forward with the commissioning of Australia’s most comprehensive post-combustion carbon dioxide (CO2) capture research facility, the CO2CRC H3 Capture Project, at International Power’s Hazelwood Power Station in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley. The project was launched by Victorian Energy and Resources Minister Peter Batchelor yesterday.
CCS has the potential to make deep cuts in global CO2 emissions, a major contributor to climate change, by capturing and storing CO2 from major sources such as power stations.
“The CO2CRC H3 Capture Project will trial three CO2 capture technologies with Australian brown coal flue gases and evaluate them for larger scale capture,” said Mr Barry Hooper, Chief Technologist of the Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies (CO2CRC), one of the world’s leading CCS research collaborations.
“Projects such as this will make retro-fitting of post-combustion capture technology more practical and affordable for all power stations.”
The project is using the 30 metre high solvent capture plant installed by International Power as part of the Hazelwood Carbon Capture Project to test and evaluate new and improved solvents, compare equipment performance, investigate impurities removal and optimise solvent capture processes.
The project will use purpose-built research modules to evaluate two new technologies for CO2 capture; membranes and adsorbents. New types of membranes can be used to sieve out CO2 molecules from gas streams and can be integrated with solvent systems. Adsorbents are solids that can capture CO2 on their surface, release it by reducing the pressure and be reused over and over.
The project will allow CO2CRC to leverage the existing research base of its capture activities in Victoria. The University of Melbourne is developing solvent and membrane technologies while Monash University performs research and development on adsorbents.
The project is part of the Latrobe Valley Post-Combustion Capture Project and is supported by the Victorian Government, through their Energy Technology Innovation Strategy (ETIS) Brown Coal R&D funding, and by the Federal Government, through the CRC Program.
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