Claimed to be the first of its kind in Europe, the Drax’s BECCS project is expected to contrite to the global efforts to combat climate change as it enables power generation while eliminating production of gases that cause global warning from the atmosphere, the firm said.
Drax plans to invest £400,000 in the proposed project, which could be the first of company’s several pilot schemes to deliver a rapid, lower cost demonstration of BECCS.
Drax Group CEO Will Gardiner said: “If the world is to achieve the targets agreed in Paris and pursue a cleaner future, negative emissions are a must – and BECCS is a leading technology to help achieve it.
“This pilot is the UK’s first step, but it won’t be the only one at Drax. We will soon have four operational biomass units, which provide us with a great opportunity to test different technologies that could allow Drax, the country and the world, to deliver negative emissions and start to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
For the demonstration project, UK outfit C-Capture will partner with Drax. C-Capture is a spin-out from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Leeds.
As part of the first phase of the demo project scheduled this month, the partners will assess whether not the C-Capture’s solvent is compatible with the biomass flue gas at the Drax Power Station.
Drax said that lab-scale feasibility study will also be carried out into the re-utilizing the flue gas desulphurisation (FGD) absorbers at the power station, and assess potential capture rates.
Based on the feasibility study result, the C-Capture team will proceed to the second phase of the pilot in the later this year.
The second phase will involve installation of a demonstration unit to isolate the carbon dioxide produced by the biomass combustion.
C-Capture and founder Chris Rayner said: “We have developed fundamentally new chemistry to capture CO2 and have shown that it should be suitable for capturing the carbon produced from bioenergy processes.
“The key part is now to move it from our own facilities and into the real world at Drax.
“Through the pilot scheme we aim to demonstrate that the technology we’ve developed is a cost-effective way to achieve one of the holy grails of CO2 emissions strategies – negative emissions in power production, which is where we believe the potential CO2 emissions reductions are likely to be the greatest.”
