Though coal burning from power plants has increased by about 50 percent in the past 30 years, the emission of pollutants has declined significantly, about 70 percent, according to Bill Reid, managing editor of Coal News Inc.
This is largely due to improvements in technology at the plants, like the new carbon capture system being jointly marketed and developed by Danbury-based ATMI Inc. and Silicon Valley-based SRI International.
ATMI announced the launch of commercialization of the new system, which combines technologies from both companies. The system includes ATMI's BrightBlack carbon adsorbent technology and a proprietary, adsorbent-based gas separation technology created by SRI International.
"SRI and ATMI have validated a new approach to carbon dioxide capture," said Chris Lantman, Ph.D., director of commercial business development, SRI Physical Sciences Division, in a statement.
"It offers significant advantages compared to current systems. SRI believes its collaboration with ATMI will bring an important solution to the marketplace."
The technology can be used in coal- or natural gas-fired plants, to capture carbon emissions. In laboratory, pilot and field tests conducted by SRI's Materials Research Laboratory, the combined system continually demonstrated efficiencies in collecting carbon dioxide of over 90 percent, with carbon dioxide purities as high as 99 percent, according to the experiments conducted by Gopala Krishnan, Ph.D., director of commercial business development at the SRI research lab.
"The combined ATMI-SRI technology has the potential to reduce CO2 emissions from the large existing installed base of coal fired power plants operating in the U.S. today," said Lou Blanchard, director of corporate marketing at ATMI. "The technology is still in development, and ATMI is working with partners to develop a small commercial demonstration within one to two years. Commercial deployment to large scale power plant applications is several years away. This effort is one example of ATMI's new initiatives around clean and sustainable technologies that we are very excited about."
With the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency enforcing stricter regulations for coal emissions, the rapid development of new technology that's up to speed with government requirements is crucial to the maintenance of the coal industry. When technology falls behind regulations, it can lead to power plant closures and unemployment, according to Reid.
"Carbon capture is exceedingly important, particularly for the coal industry," Reid said. "Over the years, there have been a lot of pieces of equipment fitted to power plants to decrease emissions. The new environmental regulations are becoming so strict that new technology is needed to go to the next step."
Over the past decades, coal burning has increased to 1 billion tons per year, Reid said.
When new technology is developed, however, it can take a few years before it can become functional in power plants.
"This kind of technology is being installed in new plants and it's being retrofitted into old plants, which usually takes a period of about five years," Reid said.