Could these tiny beads be the solution to stopping CO2 emissions?
CCS or carbon capture and storage is a climate change solution that works to safely remove CO2 from power plants and industrial processes before it reaches the atmosphere.
One method that groups like the Global CCS Institute have been promoting for carbon capture relies on large sub-systems attached to power plants and uses a chemical process involving an organic compound called amines to remove the CO2 from the plant exhaust (see my recent article on CCS here). Although there have been some success stories with CCS (notably a 110 megawatt coal plant in Canada), carbon capture still struggles with the issue of efficiency; the subsystems required to capture CO2 need energy themselves – this parasitic load increases the net cost of the power produced, sometimes making the energy uncompetitive with other sources that are not using CCS technology.
