Unlike many of their fellow engineers, though, Aniruddha Sharma and Prateek Bumb have something to show for their many years of toil. The company they founded in 2009, called Carbon Clean Solutions, has created a crucial technology the world needs to reach the low carbon-emissions targets set out in the Paris climate agreement.
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The proportion of renewable sources in the world’s energy supply is increasing rapidly, but not fast enough to keep global temperatures from rising 2°C above the pre-industrial average, which is when climate change reaches a critical point of no return. This is why both the United Nations and the International Panel on Climate Change say we need a technology that allows us to keep burning fossil fuels—even as we wean ourselves off them—without releasing all of the carbon dioxide (CO2) produced.
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For a long time, such technologies have focused on carbon capture and storage (CCS), where carbon emissions from, say, a coal power plant are collected and injected deep underground at great cost. In recent years, the focus has shifted in part to carbon capture and utilisation (CCU), where the emissions are turned into useful products.
Carbon Clean Solutions built a plant in Tuticorin in southern India that captures carbon dioxide from its coal-fired boiler and converts it into soda ash (a chemical cousin of the baking soda you buy in a grocery store). And, in what Sharma says is a world’s first, the commercial-scale plant set to capture 60,000 tons of CO2 annually does it so cheaply that it did not need any government subsidies.
So how did Sharma and Bumb do it? Typically, this is achieved by first treating the combustion exhaust gases from the coal plant to remove the small amounts of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides (which can cause undesirable reactions in the next step). Then the remaining mixture, containing mostly nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water, is passed through a chemical called monoethanolamine (MEA). This chemical reacts selectively with only CO2, and the rest of the gaseous mixture is safely released into the atmosphere. Later, the MEA-CO2 mixture is heated, which releases nearly pure carbon dioxide to be used as a raw material. The process works and the technology is in action at many plants around the world. But it’s expensive.
(With agency inputs)
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