Could emissions capturing technology change the natural gas story? | The Paper Source University

Is it possible to change the story of natural gas – or even coal – through the use of carbon capture technology?

Our most-read article over the past few days has been one about a collaboration between scientists from ExxonMobil, the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  The researchers have discovered a new material that could capture more than 90% of carbon dioxide emissions from natural gas-fired power.

Laboratory tests indicate the [patent-pending] materials, known as tetraamine-functionalised metal organic frameworks (MOF), capture carbon dioxide emissions up to six times more effectively than conventional amine-based carbon capture technology.

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By manipulating the structure of the MOF material, the team have shown the ability to “condense a surface area the size of a football field, into just one gram of mass – about the same as a paperclip – that acts as a sponge for carbon emissions,” according to the UC Berkley website.

This got me wondering: If we improved carbon capture efficiency and costs – does that change our perspective on natural gas and the gas bridge?

According to Jeffrey Long, the senior researcher on the UC Berkley team: “For CO₂ capture, steam stripping — where you use direct contact with steam to take off the CO₂ — has been a sort of holy grail for the field. It is rightly seen as the cheapest way to do it.”

“These materials, at least from the experiments we have done so far, look very promising.”

Simon Weston, senior research associate and the project lead at ExxonMobil Research and Engineering says further: “We were able to take the initial discovery and, through research and testing, derive a material that in-lab experiments has shown the potential to not only capture CO₂ under the extreme conditions present in flue gas emissions from natural gas power plants but to do so with no loss in selectivity.”

“We have shown that these new materials can then be regenerated with low-grade steam for repeated use, providing a pathway for a viable solution for carbon capture at scale.”