Portugal’s mining strategy may favour copper over lithium
Portugal already has the largest copper mine in the European Union, operated by Lundin Mining.
A fertilizer manufacturing company from the southern Indian city of Tuticorin has begun capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted from its coal-powered plant and using it to make baking soda.
System uses a new proprietary solvent that is reportedly slightly more efficient than those used conventionally, requiring less energy and smaller equipment.
The ground-breaking method, developed by Carbon Clean Solutions and believed to be a world first, involves capturing CO2 and other pollutants from coal and feeding it into a mixing chamber with salt and ammonia, creating baking soda in the process.
The proprietary solvent used, The Guardian reports, is just slightly more efficient than those used conventionally, requiring less energy and smaller equipment.
The company claims that as much as 66,000 tonnes of the gas could be captured at the plant each year and says the marginal gain in efficiency is just enough to make it feasible to run the plant without a subsidy.
Carbon capture schemes are nothing new, but until now most efforts have focused on carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies, rather than on carbon capture and utilization (CCU), which is what the Tuticorin plant is doing now.
4 Comments
Diogenes60025
Carbon capture is a waste of money and effort. Climate change is a false premise for regulating or taxing carbon dioxide emissions. Nature converts CO2 to calcite
(limestone). Climate change may or may not be occurring, but is is surely NOT caused by human fossil fuels use. Changes in temperature cause changes in ambient CO2, with an estimated 800 year time lag.
Others have shown the likely causes of climate change, and they DO NOT include human use of fossil fuels. There is no empirical evidence that fossil fuels use affects climate. Likely and well-documented causes include sunspot cycles, earth/sun orbital changes, cosmic ray effects on clouds and tectonic plate activity. The further point here is that earth naturally recycles all carbon dioxide.
Here’s why. Fossil fuels emit only 3% of total CO2 emissions. 95% comes from rotting vegetation. All the ambient CO2 in the atmosphere is promptly converted in the oceans to calcite (limestone) and other carbonates, mostly through biological
paths. CO2 + CaO => CaCO3 (exothermic). The conversion rate increases with increasing CO2 partial pressure. A dynamic equilibrium-seeking mechanism.
99.84% of all carbon on earth is already sequestered as sediments in the lithosphere. The lithosphere is a massive hungry carbon sink that converts ambient CO2 to carbonate almost as soon as it is emitted. All living or dead organic matter (plants, animals, microbes etc. amount to only 0.00033% of the
total carbon mass on earth. Ambient CO2 is only 0.00255%.
Full implementation of the Paris Treaty is now estimated to cost $50 trillion to $100 trillion by 2030–$6,667-$13,333 per human being. Nearly two-thirds of humanity’s cumulative savings over history. And will not affect climate at all.
geowall
Fully agree, but carbon capture is a political task and everybody has to play this game, sad but true nobody want to understand that we are living in a closed balance system (adiabatish) and so called carbon prnt is just bull**t and lobbying event
Mike Failla
What this scam is really about is redistribution of wealth. Out of your pocket and into their pocket. Nothing more and nothing less. What a collosal scam this is turning out to be.
Kenneth Viney
Even NASA claims the last 15 years we have been warming up .2C and Antarctic ice shelf is increasing. Dr. Drapper in Senate Sub-commitee was explicit yet the mass media claims 95% of science tells us the reverse. What a hoax to ride us of coal fired power plants. Another progressive liberal lie.