![]() Its technology addresses one of the biggest current limitations of the carbon-capture industry: how to purify CO2 out of the many types of gases released from a coal plant. Since moving to London, the company has filed six patents. So they turned to the UK government, which was willing to provide grants and special entrepreneur visas. However, they couldn’t find investors for their company in India. So how did Sharma and Bumb do it? The duo launched the company while they were still students at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. ![]() I needed a reliable stream of CO2, and this was the best way of getting it.” Chemical magic “I never thought about saving the planet. “I am a businessman,” Ramachandran Gopalan, the managing director of the Tuticorin plant, told the BBC. As a plus, the CO2 supply is also more reliable than before. Now, instead of wasting carbon dioxide that burning coal produced, the plant is capturing it and saving the money on buying any more carbon dioxide. It also bought coal to fire up its boiler. If the company is able to do that, Carbon Clean Solutions could push carbon-capture technologies into the mainstream.īefore Carbon Clean Solutions came along, the Tuticorin chemicals plant used to buy carbon dioxide to make its soda ash. “The next generation of the technology we are working on could cut the price down to $15 per ton,” he said. And Sharma says the CCU plant, built in partnership with Tuticorin Alkali Chemicals and Fertilisers, captures emissions from coal at a cost of about $30 per ton. At a recent industry conference, Peter Styring of the University of Sheffield told me that the true cost of carbon emissions, measured through environmental degradation and such, is likely close to $30 per ton. (Carbon Clean Solutions)īut there’s hope. At the Tuticorin plant: In goes carbon dioxide, out comes soda ash. On the the other hand, the leading technologies available today are only able to capture CO2 at $60 per ton – a $54 gap, at best. It is currently the world’s largest carbon-trading market and it only values emissions at $6 per ton of CO2. There is clearly a cost associated with spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and critics have long said that the market doesn’t price the emissions at its real value.Ĭonsider, for instance, the European carbon-trading scheme, which was set up to allow companies to trade their savings on carbon emissions with other companies who were spewing more of it than government regulations allowed. This is why, though carbon capture is great in theory, it hasn’t gained wide commercial use. More recently, companies like Covestro and LanzaTech have been slowly introducing CO2 as a raw material, or “feedstock,” in their commercial production process for polymers and synthetic fuels, respectively, but both have relied on some form of government support. ![]() Though carbon-capture technologies have been around since the 1970s, they have only been used profitably by oil companies to inject carbon dioxide into wells to remove every last drop of oil they can. And, in what Sharma says is a world’s first, the commercial-scale plant set to capture 60,000 tons of CO2 annually does it so cheaply that it did not need any government subsidies. In recent years, the focus has shifted in part to carbon capture and utilisation, where the emissions are turned into useful products.Ĭarbon Clean Solutions built a plant in Tuticorin in southern India that captures carbon dioxide from its coal-fired boiler and converts it into soda ash (a chemical cousin of the baking soda you buy in a grocery store). This is why both the United Nations and the International Panel on Climate Change say we need a technology that allows us to keep burning fossil fuels – even as we wean ourselves off them – without releasing all of the carbon dioxide produced.įor a long time, such technologies have focused on carbon capture and storage, where carbon emissions from, say, a coal power plant are collected and injected deep underground at great cost. The proportion of renewable sources in the world’s energy supply is increasing rapidly, but not fast enough to keep global temperatures from rising 2☌ above the pre-industrial average, which is when climate change reaches a critical point of no return. The company they founded in 2009, called Carbon Clean Solutions, has created a crucial technology the world needs to reach the low carbon-emissions targets set out in the Paris climate agreement. ![]() Unlike many of their fellow engineers though, Aniruddha Sharma and Prateek Bumb have something to show for their many years of toil. It’s a chemical engineer’s job to chase pipe dreams.
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