Materials challenges in carbon-mitigation technologies
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Materials challenges in carbonmitigation technologies Laura Espinal and Bryan D. Morreale Given the increasing size of CO2-generating industries and the mounting awareness of their environmental impact, carbon-management technologies are expected to play an important role in curtailing environmental emissions in coming years. A major challenge in carbon management is the development of cost-effective, technologically compatible, and efficient CO2 capture and storage technologies. The development of energy-efficient solvent, solid-sorbent, and membrane materials to capture CO2 from industrial exhaust streams can take improvements in process efficiency one step further. Also, the permanent storage of CO2 in geologic formations is critical to the success of carbon-management technologies and requires better understanding of interactions of CO2 with underground materials. These and other materials challenges must be solved to make carbon capture and storage an economically viable and reliable technology to be adopted by the power and product manufacturing industries.
Introduction Reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the power generation and industrial sectors is an important component of environmental sustainability. The large volume of CO2 emissions from these point sources and their stationary nature makes them particularly attractive targets. The complex global challenge is to reduce CO2 emissions while simultaneously generating energy, products, services, buildings, and public infrastructure for the continuously rising population worldwide, estimated to surpass nine billion by 2050.1 Global efforts to stabilize the atmospheric CO2 concentration require continual advances in carbon-mitigation technologies to reduce carbon sources and increase carbon sinks. Approaches to reduce carbon sources include increasing the efficiency of energy conversion and utilization; improving building insulation for energy conservation; and adopting more alternative, non-carbon energy sources such as nuclear energy and renewable fuels. In addition, natural carbon sinks, such as forests and soils, can be expanded to enhance their CO2-absorption capacities, and artificial carbon sinks can be engineered in oceans and underground geological formations for long-term storage of CO2 through a process called carbon sequestration.2 The life cycle for a fossil fuel, including proposed carbon capture and storage (CCS) in underground geological formations, is illustrated in Figure 1. The fossil fuel extracted during mining (step 1) is used for power generation by a
thermochemical conversion process, which produces CO2 emissions. The exciting mitigation opportunities for a materials scientist begin at the smokestack (step 2), where significant advances in solvent, solid-sorbent, and membrane materials are needed to cost-efficiently capture significant amounts of CO2 before it spreads into the atmosphere. Once the CO2 is captured, the role of a materials scientist continues downstream. For example, low-cost corrosion-resistant pipelines are needed to tr
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