Gas filtration station
In early 2017 [...], the Petra Nova project was launched in Texas – the world's first installation to capture carbon dioxide from emissions under the concept of "clean coal" (that is, the safe collection of CO2 that is generated by burning coal). But already in may 2020, it had to be stopped due to a drop in profitability, and instead of the declared 33%, emissions filtration in practice reached only 17.5 %. This is an unpleasant, but typical situation – according to the Global Institute for the study of carbon capture and storage, today only 19 of the 51 launched clean coal projects in the world are working.
The concept of" clean coal "assumes that if you eliminate the two key products of burning fossil fuels-soot and smoke, then the use of coal will become "clean", not polluting the environment. To do this, various technologies are used to extract the maximum amount of carbon dioxide or carbon from the emissions. It can be pumped for storage in worked-out mines filled with salt solution, afterburned in furnaces, and in the case of Petra Nova, the gas was fed 82 km to the drilling rig to increase the pressure in the drilling fluid and increase oil production. Any new good idea always has a drawback – it is very expensive to implement. The us presidential administration allocated $84 million for the launch of Petra Nova, because the project was largely political. And when oil prices collapsed in the spring of 2020, oil companies stopped production and refused to accept carbon dioxide. Similar problems are observed all over the world – it takes $100 billion a year to install cleaning equipment, but this investment will never pay off. The International energy Agency has calculated that to keep the global temperature increase at 2 degrees by 2040, you need to capture 4 gigatons of CO2 per year, and ideally – 7 gigatons. The current capacity, including clean coal projects, does not exceed 40 megatons per year, which is a hundred times less than necessary. Therefore, no matter how attractive this concept may look, it will not be enough in the current situation.
