Seeing the Round Corners

HEADS UP, the new day for Seeing the Round Corners “GOING LIVE” is Tuesday each week.

July 27, 2021

COMBUSTION CARBON CAPTURE, USE AND STORAGE..

Today’s column will be a little divergence from the columns of the last several months.  Renewable energy is the subject matter, so maybe it is also soap box time. Please stick with me, and give this idea some consideration:  Renewable energy for all of Colorado is a solution that will not supply sufficient electricity for the entire state to prevent brown outs, even possibly rationing of electricity to live as Coloradans are accustomed to living.

A former state senator who later ran for mayor of Denver was fond of classifying legislation he did not believe in or thought there was no need for as a “solution looking for a problem to solve.” Well, we shall see.

A solution that Colorado’s recent governors and many, if not most of Colorado’s citizen  legislators refuse to acknowledge is “carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS). The  definition of CCUS is “the process of capturing and storing carbon dioxide (CO2) before it can be released into the atmosphere.” The technology can capture up to 90% of CO2 released by burning fossil fuels in electricity generation and industrial processes such as cement production.

The Boilermakers at Locat555 from Manitoba, Ontario and Saskatchewan, Canada were part of the crew that built the world’s first use of utility-scale, post combustion carbon capture, use and storage at Sask power’s Boundary Dam Power Station in Saskatchewan. “Boilermaker’s role in the CCUS retrofit has led to continued advancement in CCUS, slow-but-steady adoption of the technology, and lowering costs for new CCUS builds and retrofits.”. 

Next week, Seeing the Round Corners will begin article(s) on where this new technology stands, and a close-up of the Wyoming Integrated Test Center, the only location in the U. S. capable of running devices at close to real-world scale.

The only alternative to the Wyoming test plant would have been for Membrane Technology and Research, Inc., a California company behind the new carbon-capture technology, to build its own demonstration site at great cost.

The reader's comments or questions are always welcome. E-mail me at doris@dorisbeaver.com.