Author: tlbarker@illinois.edu

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ISTC leads extensive portfolio of carbon capture projects

ISTC engineer Stephanie Brownstein gestures toward carbon capture equipment at Abbott Power Plant while speaking to visitors from the Department of Energy and Doosan Corporation
ISTC engineer Stephanie Brownstein gestures toward equipment for the biphasic solvent carbon capture project at Abbott Power Plant while speaking to visitors from the Department of Energy and Doosan Corporation. Photo by Travis Tate, U of I Facilities & Services.

Visitors from the U.S. Department of Energy National Energy Technology Laboratory (DOE-NETL) recently toured multiple carbon capture projects led by the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC).

Because the unique geology of Illinois provides extensive potential to store carbon dioxide deep underground, the state is also an ideal location to develop, demonstrate, and deploy technologies to  capture CO2 from point sources, remove CO2 from the ambient air, and beneficially use CO2. ISTC scientists and engineers lead a number of carbon capture, removal, and use projects backed by funding from the Department of Energy.

map of ISTC carbon capture project locations across Illinois and Missouri

The tour included carbon capture projects at Abbott Power Plant at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; City Water, Light & Power in Springfield, Prairie State Generating Company in Marissa, Illinois; and the Ste. Genevieve Cement Plant in Missouri. 

Abbott Power Plant

The University’s Abbott Power Plant , a cogeneration facility that simultaneously produces both steam and electricity to meet 70-75% of the Urbana campus’s energy needs, is a partner on two ISTC-led carbon capture projects.  

ISTC led a project, supported by $3.4 million from DOE-NETL, to evaluate an innovative biphasic solvent system for its efficiency and effectiveness in absorbing CO₂ from flue gas at Abbott. The system was designed based on the testing results at the laboratory scale under a previous DOE cooperative agreement. Read more about the biphasic solvent system.

A second project is based on a mixed-salt carbon capture technology developed by SRI International. This technology is being tested at engineering scale at Abbott in a 0.5 megawatt electric (MWe) equivalent pilot campaign. This project is supported by a grant of more than $18 million from DOE-NETL. Read more about the mixed-salt capture technology.

Kevin OBrien gestures as he describes ISTC carbon capture projects for visitors from DOE and Doosan
ISTC director Kevin OBrien gestures as he describes ISTC carbon capture projects for visitors from DOE and Doosan. Photo by Travis Tate, U of I Facilities & Services. 

City Water, Light & Power

ISTC leads the large-scale pilot testing of a Linde-BASF CO2 solvent-based carbon capture technology at City Water, Light & Power (CWLP) in Springfield, Illinois. When the 10-megawatt capture system is built and begins to process 5 percent of the Dallman Unit 4 flue gas, it will capture more than 90 percent of those CO2 emissions. DOE has provided $47 million for this build-operate project, and the State of Illinois has pledged an additional $20 million. Read more about the large pilot project at CWLP.

A second project led by ISTC and backed by $25 million from DOE aims to design a next-generation power plant at CWLP that both reduces emissions and captures and uses carbon dioxide. The design combines a 270-megawatt ultra-supercritical coal boiler, an 87-megawatt natural gas combustion turbine generator, a 50-megawatt energy storage subsystem, and a post-combustion carbon capture subsystem. Read more about the next-generation power plant project.

ISTC is investigating the use of CO2 captured from CWLP, as well as nutrients from wastewater treatment plants to grow algae. The cultivated high-protein Spirulina can be used in animal feeds. This engineering-scale algae project is supported by $2.5 million from DOE. Read more about the algae project. 

Prairie State Generating Company

ISTC leads a front-end engineering design (FEED) study to retrofit the Prairie State Generating Company (PSGC) in Marissa, Illinois, with a solvent-based post-combustion carbon capture technology from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. At 816 megawatts, this is the largest carbon capture FEED study in the world, with a system projected to be capable of capturing 8.5 million tonnes of CO2 each year. Read more about the FEED study at Prairie State Generating Company.

Ste. Genevieve Cement Plant

Cement is a ubiquitous construction material, and its production produces tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. While scientists are working on alternative cements and lower-carbon production processes, it is likely that capturing and either using or storing emissions from cement production will be necessary to meet carbon reduction targets.

ISTC leads a front-end engineering and design (FEED) study for a commercial-scale carbon capture retrofit of Holcim’s Ste. Genevieve Cement Plant in Bloomsdale, Missouri. The project focuses on Air Liquide’s CrycocapTM FG system for carbon capture and is backed by $4 million from DOE-NETL. Read more about the Ste. Genevieve carbon capture project.

Carbon removal through direct air capture

Projects to remove carbon dioxide from ambient air, called direct air capture (DAC), were not included in the recent tour but are a growing part of ISTC’s carbon management portfolio. 

ISTC leads a project, backed by a grant of nearly $2.5 million from DOE-NETL, to develop preliminary designs and determine feasibility for the first commercial-scale direct air capture and storage system (DAC+S) for CO2 removal in the United States. This 18-month project will explore the possibility of pulling 100,000 tonnes of CO2 from the air annually, using technology from the Swiss company Climeworks, which has built and operated several DAC plants in various climates across Europe. The ISTC-led team will test the large-scale DAC systems at three sites across the U.S. in order to assess how different climate conditions impact the process. Read more about the DAC+S project. 

ISTC and Climeworks also are collaborating on a $2.5 million FEED study of a DAC system to capture CO2 for underground storage. The California host site, a geothermal plant, will provide thermal energy to drive the DAC process; the site also is close to a proposed geological storage facility in the Joaquin Basin.   

ISTC also leads a FEED study of direct air capture technology developed by CarbonCapture Inc. at U. S. Steel’s Gary Works Plant in Gary, Indiana. This project incorporates use of the captured carbon dioxide at a nearby Ozinga ready mix concrete plant. Injecting the CO2 into the concrete as it is being mixed causes the CO2 to mineralize, locking it in the concrete and preventing it from returning to the atmosphere. By using the U. S. Steel plant’s waste heat, energy needs can be reduced. Read more about the carbon capture and use FEED study at U. S. Steel’s Gary Works Plant.  

Finally, ISTC is a partner on a project that is exploring the benefits of constructing DAC technology at Constellation Energy’s Byron nuclear energy plant in Northern Illinois. Although nuclear plants do not produce carbon emissions, the plant can provide energy to power the DAC system, which could capture 250,000 tons of CO2 each year. 

Read more about sustainable energy research and development at the Prairie Research Institute.

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U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm tours PRI carbon management projects

Pictured during the tour are, left to right, ISWS and ISTC Director Kevin C OBrien, principal investigator for the carbon capture project; Stephanie Brownstein, ISTC Assistant Scientist-Research Engineer; Secretary Granholm; Susan Martinis, Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation; and Jeff Stein, PRI Interim Executive Director.
Pictured during the tour are, left to right, ISWS and ISTC Director Kevin C OBrien, principal investigator for the carbon capture project; Stephanie Brownstein, ISTC Assistant Scientist-Research Engineer; Secretary Granholm; Susan Martinis, Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation; and Jeff Stein, PRI Interim Executive Director.

On Dec. 9, U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm toured several U of I sustainable energy projects, including PRI’s carbon capture efforts at Abbott Power Plant. During the visit she also heard about PRI’s extensive work in carbon sequestration.

Read more about PRI’s carbon management and sustainable energy research.

Read more about Secretary Granholm’s visit to U of I from The News-Gazette and Illinois Newsroom.

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DOE awards $25 million to PRI for design of innovative power plant

A rendering of the hybrid gas turbine and coal boiler power plant.
A rendering of the hybrid gas turbine and coal boiler power plant.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded $25 million to a three-year project led by the Prairie Research Institute that will design a next-generation power plant in Springfield, Illinois. The innovative plant design combines multiple techniques to both reduce emissions and capture and re-use carbon dioxide.

“With this project, we’re bringing together different pieces of the sustainable energy puzzle,” said Kevin OBrien, who is principal investigator of this project and leads the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC) and Illinois State Water Survey (ISWS). “PRI’s scientists have been advancing emissions reduction, carbon capture, and carbon utilization, and this gives us an opportunity to combine all of our expertise and experience in these areas to deliver greater impact.”

The project (Front-End Engineering Design Study for Hybrid Gas Turbine and USC Coal Boiler (HGCC) Concept Plant with Post Combustion Carbon Capture and Energy Storage System at City, Water, Light and Power Plant) is part of DOE’s Coal FIRST (Flexible, Innovative, Resilient, Small, Transformative) initiative, which aims to spur innovation in coal-fired plants. While renewable energy sources, like solar and wind, account for an increasing proportion of U.S. electricity generation, these sources are variable; coal provides a stable source of power, ensuring that consumer demand can be met consistently.

Components of the design proposed by PRI scientists and their collaborators include:

  • A 270-megawatt ultra-supercritical coal boiler subsystem
  • An 87-megawatt natural gas combustion turbine generator subsystem
  • A 50-megawatt energy storage subsystem
  • A post-combustion carbon dioxide (CO2) capture subsystem
  • An algae-basedCO2 utilization subsystem

“While these individual components have been used before, they’ve never been combined in this way,” OBrien said. “Part of our aim with this project is to standardize and modularize these components, so this design can be replicated and more easily maintained. We hope this could become the global standard for innovative, low-emission coal-fired power.”

An ultra-supercritical system operates at intense pressure, which means steam is more efficiently converted to the mechanical energy that drives the turbines to produce electricity. Increased efficiency means less coal is needed for each megawatt of power produced, reducing emissions.

Including both natural gas combustion and energy storage will provide greater flexibility and resiliency. Varying demand is tough on coal-fired boilers, because frequent shut-downs and start-ups cause huge swings in temperature and pressure that cause stress on their components. Natural gas systems don’t suffer the same stresses; they can ramp up quickly to meet surging demand and can be shut down when demand drops. Likewise, the energy storage subsystem will enable the plant to store energy to meet fluctuating consumer needs for power.

An additional benefit is that the exhaust from the natural gas system can be used to pre-heat the coal system, reducing how much coal needs to be used.

The proposed design also includes technology, developed by Linde PLC BASF, to capture carbon emissions before they reach the environment. ISTC is overseeing a large pilot test of the performance, safety, and environmental compliance of this technology at Springfield’s City Water, Light, and Power (CWLP) plant.

Finally, the captured CO2 will be used to help grow algae that can be converted into biofuel, animal feed, or biochar soil supplement.

Subawardees for the project include:

  • Doosan Heavy Industries, the developer of the HGCC technology and one of the world’s leading developers of boilers and turbines;
  • Kiewit, one of the leading engineering, procurement, and construction firms for power generation-related construction, and;
  • Global Algae Innovations, a company that specializes in the deployment of large-scale algae systems.

Other participants include Barr Engineering Co. (firing systems), Microbeam (fuel treatment), Envergex (control systems), and the University of North Dakota (additional coal sources).

This three-year front-end engineering design (FEED) study will provide DOE with a detailed understanding of the costs of scaling up this power plant design and could pave the way for the construction of this innovative plant in Springfield.

The City, Water, Light and Power plant in Springfield was chosen as the project site because it is already the test site for the carbon-capture system, its planned retirement of three older, less efficient boilers creates space for the hybrid coal-natural gas system, and a DOE CarbonSAFE project conducted by the Illinois State Geological Survey (ISGS) previously demonstrated that the region’s geology will support underground storage of CO2.

OBrien and co-principal investigator Mohamed Attalla, director of U of I Facilities & Services, and ISTC project manager Les Gioja lead the project, providing combined expertise in power generation technologies, clean-energy generation, and large-scale construction.

ISGS continues studying CO2 sequestration near Terre Haute, Indiana

ISGS is participating in a second DOE Coal FIRST project, which will study the potential redevelopment of the Wabash Valley Resources coal gasification site in West Terre Haute, Indiana. That team, led by Wabash Valley Resources, seeks to convert the existing plant so it can burn biomass as well as coal while producing hydrogen that can be used to generate electricity or sold as a product. This project will capture CO2 for storage in nearby deep saline reservoirs and aims to achieve net-negative carbon emissions by sequestering more carbon than it produces. This connects to an ongoing CarbonSAFE project that ISGS is carrying out at the Wabash Valley Resources site, studying the feasibility of developing commercial-scale CO2 storage at the location.

These projects are supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Fossil Energy, National Energy Technology Laboratory.

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This story originally appeared on the Prairie Research Institute Blog. Read the original article.

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People of PRI: Sarmila Katuwal, Visiting Scientific Specialist-Research Engineer

Sarmila Katuwal wears a cloth face covering and standard lab PPE while checking the phosphorous concentration of a designer biochar.
Sarmila Katuwal wears a cloth face covering and standard lab PPE while checking the phosphorous concentration of a designer biochar.

 

Sarmila Katuwal is involved in two research projects at ISTC. The first, led by B.J. Sharma, focuses on optimization of kraft lignin depolymerization. In the second, led by Wei Zheng, she is working on design of a biochar to capture dissolved phosphorous and ammonia nitrogen from tile drainage water.

Now that the state of Illinois has entered phase 4 of its COVID recovery plan and Katuwal is back in the lab, she talks about what has changed due to COVID-19.

Q. What precautions and safety procedures are you employing to reduce risk? 

The new safety protocols and guidelines by ISTC has made our work lot easier during this crisis. I am strictly using a face mask, practicing social distancing, and avoiding using common spaces in the office, like the lunchroom and conference room. Also, I wear proper PPE (like gloves, lab coat, eye glass) while conducting my research in the lab and do frequent hand cleaning and sanitizing.

The new one-way traffic flow system in the office building and one-person-per-lab rule has helped to reduce the possibility of social contact. In addition, I strictly follow lab cleaning protocols, which involves sanitizing the instruments and work area before and after conducting the experiment.

Q. Are there new challenges that have arisen in the lab?

The new challenges are mostly getting accustomed to new health safety protocols and making sure to follow the procedures strictly to keep myself and others safe. Also, when wearing a face mask and eyeglass together, sometimes, if the face mask is not fitted properly your eyeglass becomes foggy.

I am happy with ISTC’s current protocols, and I hope they will continue, too.

This post originally appeared on the People of PRI blog. Read the original post.

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People of PRI: Kirtika Kohli, Postdoctoral Research Associate

Postdoctoral researcher Kirtika Kohli wears the required cloth face covering and personal protective equipment while working in the lab at ISTC.
Postdoctoral researcher Kirtika Kohli wears the required cloth face covering and personal protective equipment while working in the lab at ISTC.

This post originally appeared on the People of PRI blog.

ISTC postdoctoral researcher Kirtika Kohli is working on a project led by B.K. Sharma to develop novel catalysts for making chemicals from CO2. As the state of Illinois has entered phase 4 of COVID recovery, Kohli has been able to return to work in the lab while observing appropriate precautions, including wearing a face mask and following designated one-way paths while entering, leaving, and moving about the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center facility.

Only a single person works in the lab at a time, but Kohli says “Still I feel I need to be very careful, not for me only but for others, too.”

Q. What precautions and safety procedures are you employing to reduce risk while working in the lab? 

When I enter the lab, I follow the standard lab safety procedures, including putting on a lab coat, a pair of gloves, and eye googles (to protect my eyes). I also disinfect all the lab surfaces, such as benchtops, fume hood, reactor surfaces, etc.

After I am done with my work in the lab, I clean the lab space and eye goggles with disinfectant, discard the gloves in a trash bag, remove my lab coat, and wash my hands with soap at least two times. As I am leaving the facility, I pass multiple disinfecting stations, so I make sure to use hand sanitizer each time.

As a researcher, our minds are often thinking about experiments, so the posted signs that explain the guidelines about room occupancy, restroom use, social distancing, etc. are good to remind us.

Following a single path to enter and a single path to exit the facility sometimes gives you a smile, like you are playing some game in which you need to follow red big signs!

Q. Are there new challenges that arise because of these precautions?

Wearing a mask all the time—sometimes it feels OK and sometimes it is irritating. The major challenge is to speak loudly while wearing a mask when you are in a conference call.

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People of PRI: Angela DiAscro, field chemist

Field chemist Angie DiAscro wears a mask while performing titrations with her travel kit during a site visit.
Field chemist Angie DiAscro wears a mask while performing titrations with her travel kit during a site visit.

This post originally appeared on the People of PRI blog.

Angela DiAscro is a field chemist with the Institutional Water Treatment program, which provides water treatment advice to facilities with institutional water systems including cooling towers, chillers, boilers, etc. Like many people, she spent a large part of the spring working from home but has recently been able to resume field activities, while observing proper COVID-19 precautions.

Q. What is your role with the Institutional Water Treatment program? 

I am a field chemist who travels throughout Illinois to sites, where I test boiler, cooling, softener water, etc. to make sure the systems have appropriate treatment levels. This helps the systems run more efficiently and have a longer lifespan. I often go to state police sites, correctional centers, veterans homes, some universities, and historical sites.

Q. Now that the state of Illinois has entered phase 4 of its COVID recovery plan and you’re back in the field, what precautions and safety procedures are you employing to reduce risk? 

There are three of us who travel and each of us are, of course, wearing masks when we are at a site. We often interact with engineers at least part of the time we are on site and it is nice to see that many of the engineers are wearing masks, too.

Each of us have our own rental vehicles to travel and instead of renting them daily or weekly as we did previously, we rent them for a whole month to cut back on the number of different cars we interact with. We are currently training our newest field chemist, so instead of riding in the same car to sites, now he has to arrive in his own rental car and we do our best to stay 6 feet apart while we are at the site together.

We were not encouraged to stay in hotels when we started travelling again, either. Before the pandemic I would stay in one to two hotels a week for work, but now we are mostly doing day trips. Currently we have received the okay to stay in large chain hotels as long as we take disinfectant wipes/ sprays with us.

I keep hand sanitizer in the rental car and use it whenever I stop for food or gas. Before I leave a site, I wash my hands with soap and water for 20 seconds if it is available. I also try to use my own pen whenever I need to sign in or out at certain sites.

The bottom line though, is that we don’t need to do anything that we are not comfortable with (e.g. stay in a hotel, go to sites in high COVID areas), which I really appreciate.

Angie and her colleague Cameron observe appropriate precautions by using separate vehicles to travel to a site visit at Dickson Mounds State Museum.
Angie and her colleague Cameron observe appropriate precautions by using separate vehicles to travel to a site visit at Dickson Mounds State Museum.

Q. What new challenges do these unusual times and new precautions create? 

Since we drive individual cars now and aren’t staying in hotels as often, I have had several 12+ hour days. My farthest site is ~3.5 hours away, in southern Illinois, so to do that in one day is already seven hours of travel. Without someone else in the car with you, it gets very tiring.

Many of the places we go do not have air conditioning and there is extra heat given off by the boiler or other systems present in the same room, so it can get above 95 degrees F. Now that I wear a mask while performing the site visit, I make sure I have water, a decent lunch, and hopefully a place to sit to take extra breaks while enduring the heat. Besides the heat, wearing a mask can be challenging because people can’t hear me, so I need to speak up.

Also, people can’t tell when I am smiling but hopefully they can see it from my eyes because I usually am!

Q. Is there anything else you’d like the institutions and people you work with to know? 

I miss seeing a lot of people and it is harder to get simple questions answered or papers signed since I can’t just walk to someone’s office, but I’m glad people are taking this seriously and doing what we can to keep ourselves and others safe.

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Show impact by adding metrics to your Illinois Sustainability Award application

Adding metrics to your Illinois Sustainability Award application allows evaluators to truly see the quantitative or qualitative impacts that your organization, program or technology have achieved. Plus, metrics are important for your own use—to tell your story to stakeholders, to evaluate next steps in your sustainability efforts, and to determine the effectiveness of what you’ve done thus far.

Without an understanding of resource use before starting a project, how can you truly understand its impact on your bottom line and resource reduction? A major key to understanding project or program impact is to create a baseline for your project, program or initiative. By creating a baseline, you are creating a road map to tracking the success of an initiative and seeing what resource use looks like before implementing a new program, technology, initiative, or strategy. This is important to tracking the success of your efforts and can even help when asking for more money or resources for future environmental projects or initiatives.

There are many tools and calculators that can be used to help create an annual baseline, such as ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager (tracks energy, water, and waste). However, entering use data in a simple Excel spreadsheet can also yield a baseline. Important resources to baseline in your organization or business are energy and water use, waste, chemical use, and purchasing. If you have a fleet, fuel use might also be a good metric to track.

Before you start your project, choose an evaluation timeline – how long are you going to track metrics to see if your project was successful? What information would you need to collect? Remember to keep it simple and hone in on exactly which metrics will show reduction in resource use. Throughout the duration of the project, continue to track those metrics, even after the initiative or project has been implemented. Then, take time to analyze the data and see if a change has been made in the resources used.

Metrics don’t always need to be quantitative – especially if you are tracking impact of outreach or effect of a program on a particular group of people. Data such as number of people reached with information, or number of people participating in the program can be valuable as well. If you’re working with a group of people, get testimonials on impact of the program in their organization or everyday life. Ask whether the initiative, project or program will, or has already, affected their future success, or if connections outside of the project, program or initiative were made that otherwise would not have occurred.

The Sample Application section of the ISTC website can give you an idea of how to enter in data and metrics into our metrics spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel format) and talk to your team about what per-unit measures you might use in your application. If you have further questions, contact Deb Jacobson or Irene Zlevor for more information via e-mail (djacobso@illinois.edu or izlevor@illinois.edu) or by phone (630) 472-5016.

Remember, applications are due May 3. Start your application now!