Canada Launches World's First Clean Coal Power Plant

The world’s first commercial thermal power plant capable of capturing its own carbon dioxide emissions was officially launched in Canada. The researchers believe that this is a landmark for the development of "clean coal-fired" technology.

Saskatchewan’s “Border Dam” project aims to capture and sell approximately 1 million tons of carbon dioxide gas (90% of the CO2 emissions of its modified power equipment) annually to Cenovus Energy & Oil Company. These compressed gases will be piped deep into the ground to obtain sought-after underground crude oil. At the same time, unsold gas will be transferred to the aquistore research project.

As Nature magazine stated in an article on the program in April this year, carbon dioxide capture and storage (ccs) technology is not cheap.

The reconstruction of the “Boundary Dam” project will cost 1.3 billion Canadian dollars (about 1.2 billion U.S. dollars), which will depend on government subsidies of 240 million U.S. dollars, while saskpower, the only electricity supplier in the province, hopes that the regulator will Can agree to increase electricity prices by 15.5% in the next 3 years.

However, experts believe that the greatest hope of this project lies in the ability of engineers to learn how to use this technology at a lower cost.

This project in Canada is only the first to aim at a significant reduction in global carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 to build thousands of clean coal-fired power plants. (In 2012, alone, the world's coal-burning carbon dioxide alone generated 15 billion tons, accounting for 43% of the world's total carbon dioxide emissions.)

Judging from the current timetable, nowhere in the world is close to achieving this goal: this technology is too expensive, and so far there has been no political will to impose a heavy tax on the use of fossil fuels that are the basis of CO2 emissions, and only this This approach can encourage the development of clean coal-fired technology.

According to the researchers, as early as 2009, the International Energy Agency (iea) published a roadmap calling for 100 large-scale ccs projects by 2020. However, by July 2013, these projects have not been able to shape, so iea Reduce this goal to 30 ccs projects. But even so, this is still an "ambitious" plan.

However, experts pointed out that despite this, clean coal-fired technology has finally taken root in Canada.

At present, about a dozen projects have already stored millions of tons of carbon dioxide gas—mostly extracted from natural gas processing plants, and the thermal power plant in Saskatchewan that just cut ribbon marks the first time A commercial coal-fired power plant has adopted clean coal-fired technology.

It is reported that a new coal-fired power plant built in Kemper County, Mississippi, USA - designed to store 3.5 million tons of carbon dioxide gas per year - could not be started this year and was postponed until 2015.

The zero-carbon emission technology of coal is also called carbon capture technology. There are many studies now underway to better improve this technology. In order to reduce carbon emissions, it is important to capture carbon and then bury it deep underground instead of emitting it into the atmosphere.