New chemistry enables UK negative carbon dioxide emissions pilot

UK chemists and the country’s biggest power plant are developing a system that we’ll likely need to help keep global temperature rises from reaching dangerous levels. The £400,000 pilot scheme at Drax in North Yorkshire will be one of the first tests of biomass energy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS. The University of Leeds’ Chris Rayner tells Chemistry World the underlying chemical technology, provided by spin-out company C-Capture, is ‘probably the best in the world’.

‘By the end of the project we plan to have operated a unit capable of capturing one tonne of CO₂ per day,’ says Rayner. The resulting data will help design another pilot, around a 100 times larger. ‘We would need units operating in the thousands of tonnes per day [range] to capture a substantial amount of CO₂ that Drax produces,’ Rayner stresses.