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Friday, November 16, 2007 Carbon Capture Moves AheadBlue Source demonstrates a remediation system that could capture carbon dioxide at advanced coal plants. By Peter Fairley
If the U.S. coal-fired power industry is ever to switch to advanced, cleaner technologies, it will need an effective way to capture and store its emissions of carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas. Blue Source, a company based in Salt Lake City, recently took a positive step in demonstrating a viable strategy when it started up its first carbon-capture and -storage project. Blue Source is piping industrial carbon dioxide from a natural-gas processing plant in southeastern Colorado to an undisclosed oil producer that will, in turn, pump it into an aging oil field. The result should be increased crude production and a carbon-dioxide emissions reduction equivalent to taking 70,000 cars off the road. Blue Source's project is innovative not technically--the company employs off-the-shelf technology--but financially: it is among the first whose business plan hinges on the sale of both the captured carbon dioxide and carbon offsets, a financial derivative generated from the emissions reduction. Analysts say that this business model could help commercialize advanced coal-fired power plants and carbon-capture technology that is languishing under weak pollution-control policies in the United States. "Its success will lay the groundwork to enable power-plant projects to go down the same route, should a more extensive carbon policy emerge," says Alex Klein, a senior analyst tracking developments in power generation for consultancy Emerging Energy Research, based in Cambridge, MA. Blue Source's model is viable thanks to a combination of pricey oil and cheaper carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide that Blue Source is shipping out of the Apple Tree gas processing plant in Colorado's Huerfano County is cheap because it is already concentrated (unlike the effluent from a conventional power plant, which is diluted with nitrogen gas). The carbon dioxide is stripped off of the gas from the county's natural-gas wells, which are just 22 percent methane. Most carbon dioxide of this sort is simply vented. Blue Source installed the compressors and pipes needed to pump it to an existing carbon-dioxide pipeline 16 miles away. Pricey oil helps because oil producers use carbon dioxide to loosen up crude trapped underground and facilitate its flow to the surface. (Carbon dioxide that comes back up with the oil is stripped off and pumped back down.) When a barrel of crude fetches more, oil producers will pay more for carbon dioxide. Blue Source and its backers are clearly betting that the market for carbon-dioxide remediation will continue to grow as states introduce caps on carbon-dioxide emissions. What's more, Congress is considering regulating greenhouse gases. (This has already happened in Europe, where a mandated carbon cap-and-trade program has driven the price of carbon-dioxide offsets to more than €20 [$29] per ton. Such offsets sell for just $2 a ton on the Chicago Climate Exchange.) Investment banks agree: last year, Blue Source raised $1 billion in financing through First Reserve, based in Greenwich, CT, the largest private equity firm focused on energy. |
A Cheap CO2 Trap
04/22/2008



Comments
devassocx on 11/16/2007 at 2:30 AM
21
or something. Of course its not and it isn't even
CO.
If this proves to be a decent and economical use
for the stuff then fine.
They might also consider canning the stuff and selling it to the soft drink makers. This way the soft drink guys won't have to have some other
company make the stuff for them.
I sort of think this whole thing is overblown by the politicians and the masses are buying into it.
Viv on 11/16/2007 at 7:06 AM
8
co. co2 are valuable feed-stocks in a number of industries and co2s relevance as a raw material is growing, but all the press and politicians want to do is throw it away.
kearns on 11/16/2007 at 12:26 PM
23
dboots on 01/01/2008 at 3:26 AM
4
well with plutonium or uranium? Or maybe it repels it into another chemical, considering all
the chemtrails they have been Xing our skies
with in every state and COUNTRY ACROSS THE GLOBE.
Think of all those Superfund clean up spots that
still today after 15 years, they barely have done
any clean up to any of the hundreds of sites in
each state.
abcarterjr on 11/17/2007 at 11:18 AM
45
Algae Farm?
killian on 11/23/2007 at 4:06 PM
54
icsdam on 04/24/2008 at 9:12 AM
2
Seems all other aproaches to algae farming as a mitigation solution concentrate on oil production. That's incidental compared to the myriad other downstream products available in A2BE's process. I've seen the mass balance on this-THESE guys got the goods!
DJTal on 11/18/2007 at 9:11 AM
109
markwaddle on 11/18/2007 at 5:24 PM
1
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/17/science/earth/17climate.html
shomas on 11/23/2007 at 11:38 AM
15
DJTal on 11/27/2007 at 11:14 AM
109
shomas on 12/04/2007 at 12:22 AM
15
DJTal on 12/08/2007 at 9:36 AM
109
shomas on 12/16/2007 at 11:18 PM
15
I'd like to bring to attention, a growing body of scientist that belive global temperature changes are more tightly coupled to changes in cloud cover resulting from solar cyclic activity than changes in CO2 concentrations. weather or not (no pun intended) good scientific processes prove or disprove that theory it is reasonably clear that the scientific processes has been abandoned by many in the global warming alarmist camp in exchange for Marxist economies and falsely protecting the environment by displacing pollution production from developed nations to undeveloped nations through the Kyoto Protocol.
DJTal on 12/17/2007 at 6:27 AM
109
dboots on 01/01/2008 at 3:31 AM
4
Earth.
And all those chemtrails they have been Xing our
skies with have contributed to the so called
"Global Warming " scenario of theirs.
Those chemicals cause a reflecting surface which
helps them make energy from the sun. Then because
they have no where to store this energy, they
have made Earth's surfaces the storage area.
They say EVERY TREE (N BUILDINGS) ARE CELL TOWERS. My common sense says they are not talking
about commications.
devassocx on 12/19/2007 at 2:08 AM
21
Please do a web search on this and you will see.