Extracting carbon dioxide from power plant exhaust and storing it underground may be the only hope to avoid a climate change catastrophe caused by burning fossil fuels
Like all big coal-fired power plants, the 1,600-mega-watt-capacity Schwarze Pumpe plant in Spremberg, Germany, is undeniably dirty. Yet a small addition to the facility—a tiny boiler that pipes 30 MW worth of steam to local industrial customers—represents a hope for salvation from the global climate-changing consequences of burning fossil fuels.
To heat that boiler, the damp, crumbly brown coal known as lignite—which is even more polluting than the harder black Âanthracite variety—burns in the presence of pure oxygen, releasing as waste both water vapor and that more notorious greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2). By condensing the water in a simple pipe, Vattenfall, the Swedish utility that owns the power plant, captures and isolates nearly 95 percent of the CO2 in a 99.7 percent pure form.
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That CO2 is then compressed into a liquid and given to another company, Linde, for sale; potential users range from the makers of carbonated beverages, such as Coca-Cola, to oil firms that use it to flush more petroleum out of declining deposits. In principle, however, the CO2 could also be pumped deep underground and locked safely away in specific rock formations for millennia.
