Save planet and lives –
carbon negative power.
Economic too.
Whilst parts of the world move slowly towards carbon-neutral energy sources, others lag behind, heavily reliant on coal power stations and other power sources that release greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and have negative impacts upon air quality. Yet increasingly it seems that carbon-neutral isn’t enough: in order to limit global temperature increases carbon-negative technologies are required.
One route for carbon-negative power generation is to convert biomass into energy and then capture and store the waste carbon dioxide. By removing the carbon in the biomass from the environment this is a carbon-negative process. Yet currently this isn’t efficient and requires too much land to grow the plants, land that is then unavailable for much needed food production.
Research by Lu et al (2019) has used China as a case study to address this issue since China is heavily dependent on coal power stations. Instead of relying exclusively on biomass, the researchers propose using a combination of biomass and coal to develop a pure source of hydrogen fuel. They found that a minimum of 35% biomass could result in carbon-negative power generation. Not only that but the biomass used in the process could be plant material leftover after harvesting, plant material which is currently burnt in the fields and is a major source of air pollution. What’s more the researchers suggest that the process would be as cost effective, and thus competitive, with the current coal fired power stations.
Original research: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1812239116