ISTC News Highlights
Credit: CarbonCapture
"The United States Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (DOE-NETL) has selected the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Prairie Research Institute (PRI) for an award of $3,459,554 for research and development to support a front-end engineering design (FEED) study on carbon dioxide (CO2) removal technologies. The study will focus on the advancement of a direct air capture and utilization system (DACUS), which can remove 5,000 metric tons per year of CO2 from ambient air and then permanently mineralize it in concrete products. If built, the designed system would be larger than any existing direct air capture system (DAC)."
ISTC's sister survey, the Illinois State Geological Survey, has partnered with an ethanol production plant to test geologic storage of captured carbon dioxide. One Earth Energy, an ethanol plant near Gibson City, ends up with 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually as a byproduct to ethanol production. Preliminary tests of the liquified carbon dioxide injection study show promising results in an effort to reduce the carbon footprint of the renewable fuel.
ISTC engineer Paul Nielsen stands beside the biphasic solvent system at the Abbott Power Plant.
Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC) researchers have given the thumbs up to an innovative biphasic solvent system for its efficiency and effectiveness in absorbing CO₂ from flue gas in a coal-fired power plant at the University of Illinois (U of I).
With $3.4 million from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Energy Technology Laboratory, an ISTC team sought to validate the various advantages of a biphasic CO₂ absorption process (BiCAP) at a 40-kilowatt electric small pilot scale at the Abbott Power Plant on the U of I campus. The system was designed based on the testing results at the laboratory scale under a previous DOE cooperative agreement.
Several ISTC researchers recently had abstracts accepted for the 16th Greenhouse Gas Control Technologies Conference (GHGT16), to be held October 23-27, 2022 in Lyon, France. GHGT is the principal international conference for greenhouse gas mitigation technologies and focuses on carbon capture, utilization, and storage.