Can Natural Gas Be Used to Create Power With Fewer Emissions?
LA PORTE, TEXAS — It wasn’t like it is in the movies. Nobody pulled down a big switch on the wall, producing a satisfying “thunk” and crackle of electricity. Instead, one evening last November, a shift supervisor for NET Power, a clean-energy technology company, clicked a mouse several times in a control room set in a double-wide trailer. With the last click, the company’s generator synchronized with the Texas grid, a major step toward providing power to homes and businesses. Twenty-seven minutes later, the supervisor cut off the connection.
It might not sound like much, but that brief display at this demonstration plant — with a fraction of the capacity of a full-scale facility — showed that a novel way of generating electricity that burns natural gas but doesn’t generate the same greenhouse gas emissions as fossil fuels, could play nicely with the nation’s power grid.
Related Knowledge Center: Carbon capture
The federal government is investing heavily in the development of carbon capture and storage (or sequestration), which offers the enticing prospect of preventing carbon dioxide emissions produced during combustion from entering the atmosphere and contributing to climate change. But the technologies involved, while proven, remain expensive, an obstacle to widespread adoption.