Saturday, November 17, 2007

Carbon Capture Moves Ahead

Blue Source demonstrates a remediation system that could capture carbon dioxide at advanced coal plants.
From MIT's Technology Review:

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....MORE