Isra-Mart srl : ETI eyes gas CCS breakthrough with new research projects

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Isra-Mart srl news:
The Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) has kicked off a "multi million pound" project that aims to develop cheaper carbon capture technologies for gas-fired power stations.

The organisation announced a request for proposals yesterday targeting post-combustion technologies with low capital costs that can be retrofitted to existing Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) plants.
Funds are available to invest in the early stages of two 'next-generation' technologies, before the ETI selects the best one for testing at an industrial scale plant.

Bidders will need to demonstrate that their projects would be sufficiently advanced by 2015 to allow a power station designer to factor the technology into a plant's operations within five years. The aim is to enable CCGT stations to be part of the expansion of carbon-capture and storage (CCS) implementation that is expected to take place in the 2020s and early 2030s.

To date carbon capture technology has been mainly focused on coal-fired power stations in the UK to the extent that gas plant projects were excluded from the government's demonstration competition.

However, the next phase of the competition is open to gas projects, and European funding is equally supportive to coal and gas proposals.

ETI chief executive Dr David Clarke said that gas would remain an important source of energy for the UK throughout the coming decades, but the country would have to fit carbon capture systems to all fossil-fuelled power stations by the 2030s to meet its emissions goals.

"Gas remains the UK's primary energy source and our estimates suggest we will have around 30GW of CCGT capacity by 2030," he said. "Through CCS technology, fossil fuels can be economically used in an environmentally acceptable way to provide significant quantities of competitively priced energy on demand, and so will be an important contribution to the energy mix in the future."

The ETI's project looking at the next generation of CCS for coal-fired power stations is expected to start in the autumn.