Book explores fuel issues for engineers
Monday, June 2, 2008
Penn State Live
Bruce G. Miller, associate director, EMS Energy Institute, and David A. Tillman, chief engineer of fuels and combustion, Foster Wheeler NA, are the co-editors of "Combustion Engineering Issues for Solid Fuel Systems," published by Elsevier.
The book combines modeling, policy/regulation and fuel properties with cutting edge breakthroughs in solid fuel combustion for electricity generation and industrial applications. This book moves beyond theory to provide readers with real-life experiences and tips for addressing the various technical, operational and regulatory issues that are associated with the use of fuels.
Turning CO2 into chalk and sand
New method could make carbon sequestration cheaperFriday, August 22, 2008
Science News
By Davide Castelvecchi
Removing carbon dioxide from smokestacks and storing it permanently is one of the possible solutions to global warming, but remains expensive to do. A new technique could make carbon sequestration economical on a large scale, while producing useful materials on the side.
Dirk Van Essendelft, a chemical engineer at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, described the method on August 19 in Philadelphia during a meeting of the American Chemical Society. He proposed a new way to mix CO2 with a type of mineral called serpentine, producing sand and another common mineral similar to chalk.
Capturing the CO2 from smokestacks requires energy. Van Essendelft said that, according to his calculations, a power plant that captures its emissions for storage into serpentine would suffer only a 10 percent loss of energy. If the technique can be applied on a large scale, storing carbon in minerals would become competitive with other proposals for carbon sequestration, such as pumping CO2 deep underground. “It puts mineral carbonation back in the game, as far as energy consumption,” he said.
Mercedes Maroto-Valer of the University of Nottingham in England says that the technique could be economical for large-scale carbon sequestration.
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