Wired: Green Fuel-Cell Makeover for Future Power Plants
While most green attention has been focused on wind, solar and other renewable resources, a team at MIT has proposed an alternative power plant that would use natural gas, but wouldn’t emit carbon dioxide.
Crucially, the new plants wouldn’t burn natural gas, they’d feed it to solid oxide fuel cells, electrochemical devices that convert the energy stored in the gas into electricity through a chemical reaction that’s more efficient than traditional combustion.
Theoretically, the plant would be able to turn heat into electricity with an efficiency of 74 percent, as compared with just 50 percent at the very best natural gas plants (.pdf). And what’s left over isn’t the mix of gases that traditionally goes up a power plant’s smokestack, but relatively pure water and carbon dioxide.
“Because we’re keeping the nitrogen out of there, it’s very, very easy to take the CO2 out,” said MIT engineer Tom Adams, co-author of a paper in the Journal of Power Sources on the new plant design.
Though some of the scientists who have been working on solid oxide fuel cells for a long time don’t think the MIT model is realistic, it does showcase some of the advantages of solid oxide fuel cells that could make them a major part of the low-carbon energy future. Specifically, solid oxide fuel cells make capturing carbon dioxide emissions easier and less expensive compared to other ways of using fossil fuels.
“The basic point is that we’re able to avoid the CO2-capture penalty,” Adams said. …
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