WASHINGTON, April 14, 2016 - Even with the Paris Agreement in
place, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projects
that global coal-fired power generation will increase over the next few
decades. So researchers at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) are looking for a cleaner way to use coal which
could help reduce carbon emissions, while meeting the needs of a growing and
increasingly industrialized world population.
Conventional coal-burning power plants typically have low
efficiency, with only about 33 percent
of the energy contained in the coal actually converted to electricity, However,
MIT researchers have invented
a process that potentially doubles coal’s fuel-to-electricity efficiency. This
essentially equates to a 50 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions for a
given amount of power produced.
The process, described in the Journal
of Power Sources, combines two well-known technologies, coal gasification
and fuel cells, into a
single system. Coal gasification extracts burnable gaseous fuel from pulverized
coal, rather than burning the coal itself. Fuel cells then produce electricity
from the gaseous fuel by passing it through a battery-like system where the
fuel reacts electrochemically with oxygen.
According to the researchers’ simulations, the proposed
combined gasification and fuel cell system could achieve efficiencies as high
as 55 to 60 percent.
The system would be more expensive than existing plants, the
researchers say, but the initial capital investment could be paid off within
several years due to the system’s state-of-the-art efficiency.
“The exploration of unconventional hybrid cycles represents
the future of clean energy production in this country,” says David Tucker, a
research scientist at DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory in West
Virginia. “Many technologies that may seem unfeasible at first glance hold the
greatest promise as solutions to difficult problems. The first step is always
to evaluate the potential of these cycles,” as the MIT team has done, says
Tucker.
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