Hope for a new era of student commitment to carbon management research
Governments and corporations are increasing their support for advancing carbon capture, use and storage.
That may inspire students in energy research to commit to making CCUS a critical contributor to sustainable energy, Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy co-director Sally Benson said Wednesday at a major, international energy conference.
U.S. Under Secretary of Energy Mark Menezes announced at the CERAWeek conference that the Department of Energy is calling for commercial engineering designs for CCUS at power plants fueled by coal and natural gas. Menezes, a member with Benson on a CCUS panel at the conference, said two designs—one for coal and one for natural gas—will be funded for a total of $30 million. Also on that panel, the Oil & Gas Climate Initiative’s Pratima Rangarajan announced that her organization will fund additional CCUS research, and she invited the initiative’s member companies to join the effort.
“Back in the early days when CCUS enjoyed a lot of enthusiasm, we had many students who wanted to work on this,” said Benson. “But, as we go through the roller coaster with young people charting their life course, unless they see that we’re on a steady course with resources from the government and companies, it’s very hard for them to explain to their parents why they’re working on CCUS.”
“These developments are very encouraging,” said Benson. “I would love to see us get back to massive enthusiasm from students” to advance these critical technologies.
Most climate and energy scientists have come to agree over the past several years that limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius requires significant CCUS, panel members agreed. The captured carbon could be permanently stored underground or used to make building materials, useful chemicals or carbon-neutral fuels.
“CCUS is growing 5.5 percent a year, as it has since it started in the 1990s,” Benson said. “The progress has been slow due to a lack of financial incentives. To meet our climate goals, we need to grow CCUS at 20 to 25 percent a year.”
Members of the panel noted other encouraging development for CCUS. Last year, the U.S. government enacted “45Q,” which increased the tax credit for companies that capture and store carbon emissions in geologic formations or use CO2 to extract oil from existing wells. Also, U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry in December asked an industry group for a road map of what it will take for the United States to implement CCUS domestically and become a global leader in CCUS technology. John Mingé, former president of BP America, is leading that study. Mingé, another member of Wednesday’s panel, said the report will provide that strategy, including barriers and how to overcome them.
“45Q will stimulate capture from high purity sources like ethanol plants, but the incentives aren’t enough to stimulate much carbon capture for low purity sources like power plants,” said Benson. “We should consider an add-on to 45Q when CO2 is captured from low purity sources.”
As for the use of CO2 for enhanced oil recovery, Benson said companies regard CO2 as a cost, so they minimize injections relative to oil output. Public policies for sustainable energy should get them to consider CO2 injection as a revenue stream, she said.
Particulate matter filters for hybrid vehicles
Also at CERAWeeek on Wednesday, Simona Onori, professor in Stanford’s Energy Resources Engineering described her research of interest to conference participants. Onori addressed advanced filters of particulate matter for hybrid vehicles available in the European Union and China, and how to make them available in United States, among other projects. She also described her efforts to advance algorithms to predict battery life, given that sensors to do that do not yet exist.
Onori became an assistant professor in the Energy Resources Engineering Department at Stanford in the fall of 2017. She started the Stanford Energy Control Lab, where she and her students conduct system-level characterization and aging experiments of energy storage technologies. Onori won an NSF CAREER award in 2017, among several other awards that year.
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