By IANS,
Sydney : In a pilot project that has far-reaching implications, an Australian power station has used a “carbon capturing” plant to trap a bulk of its CO2 emissions.
The “post-combustion-capture (PCC) pilot plant” at the Loy Yang Power Station in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley trapped up to 85 percent of its CO2 emissions.
The 10.5 metre-high pilot plant is designed to capture up to 1,000 tonnes of CO2 annually from the power station’s exhaust-gas flues. Future trials will involve the use of a range of different CO2-capture liquids.
“PCC uses a liquid to capture CO2 from… flue gases and can potentially reduce CO2 emissions from existing and future coal-fired power stations by more than 85 percent,” said David Brockway of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), which ran the pilot.
Coal is the primary fuel for a bulk of the world’s current power supply and global efforts are on to make it a cleaner energy source.
“This is the first time anyone in the Southern Hemisphere has captured CO2 using the PCC process at a power station and we are thrilled we’ve been able to prove this technology,” Brockway said.
This milestone followed the Garnaut Report’s recognition that Australia has an important role to play in developing low emission coal technologies such as PCC.
CSIRO is undertaking similar PCC research at Munmorah near New South Wales and in Beijing, and is negotiating the installation of another pilot plant at a Queensland site.