Wow is Right: Clean Technology Removes More than Just Carbon Dioxide
by Jeremy Elton Jacquot, Los Angeles on 06.29.07
Developing a cheap and effective technology to scrub clean the emissions spewing forth from thousands of factory smoke stacks around the world would go a long ways toward tackling global warming. With coal-powered utilities likely to continue mushrooming at a steady rate in rapidly developing countries like China and India, finding a way to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions has become a clear priority.
The aptly named Wow Energy may have just invented the technology necessary to help accomplish that challenging objective. Its proprietary technology, dubbed Wow-Clean, is superior to that of its competitors in one main respect: in addition to removing carbon dioxide from emissions, it also tackles sulphur, nitrogen and mercury. In recent tests conducted by a third party, Wow's technology was shown to remove 85 - 95% of heavy metal pollutants and up to 85% of carbon dioxide from emissions, compared with other scrubbers, whose technologies only removed an average of 50 - 60% of mercury from emissions.
The technology works by first cooling the emissions and then adding chemicals to allow them to be converted into water soluble, non-polluting compounds and solid particles that can then be washed out. It is highly versatile: it can be installed on coal-fired power plants, furnaces, incinerators, gasifiers, gas turbines and a bevy of other utilities.
By combining several scrubbing technologies into one, Wow-Clean is more efficient than its rivals, and cheaper as well. With costs ranging between $22 and $25 million for a typical 250 megawatt power plant, Wow's technology is about as expensive as that of single pollutant scrubbers, a clear advantage in an increasingly competitive market.
"This technology can make coal a clean and pollution-free fuel and allow industry to upgrade existing electrical generating units rather than build new, expensive and unproven power plants to supply the world's demands for clean power," said Daniel Stringer, Wow's chairman and the inventor of its breakthrough technology.
Via ::Financial Times: Tough task of getting polluters to come clean (newspaper)
See also: ::Canadian Company Testing Enzymatic CO2 Capture, ::Liquid Chimney Could Reduce Global Warming, ::Algatech and GreenFuel: Partnering For The Sake Of Algae And Fuel, ::'No No No': Beijing's Officials Ordered to Reduce Their Emissions For a Day
Exhaust gas cooling is typically done by water injection. When that is a requirment it's more likely to experience bag-house filter plugging and its also possible that you are producing a liquid waste stream with co-mingled dissolved metals and particulate solids. This is called "media shifting" and has serious risks of unanticipated impacts and costs.
Will the amount of mercury in fly ash solids be increased with this technology? If so, then does the utility land filing permit still allow landfill disposal? Perhaps not.
What chemicals are used and what is the energy input to make and ship them? without that knowledge efficiency can not be fairly evaluated.
Time will tell.
The PDF file on their site states that "25% or more" of CO2 is removed but significantly higher amounts of heavy metals, NOx, and sulfur. They also state that all of these compounds are resulting effluent is "discharged in the form of stable salts and other precipitated compounds that can be discharged into conventional industrial or marine waste
water systems."
So it seems that it's OK to dump salts of heavy metals into the ocean again? We need to take a close look at these new technologies, many are not as green as they portend to be.
Great development.
This could give us some breathing space during our movement from the age of oil to the age of solar.
Coal is a limited resource and best we don't expect it to solve all our problems, but at least this would allow us to avoid more new nuclear. And it could help free us from further oil wars.
Here's hoping that Wow isn't blowing (clean) smoke.
Sounds water intensive.
Interesting and thought provoking article. I thought that we should clarify some of your reader’s comments given that our processes are new and as yet not widely understood:
1. The flue gases are not cooled with water; they are cooled by another process called the WOWGen which removes the heat by producing electricity. This is achieved without the need to burn any additional fuel.
2. The waste water treatment plants will do exactly that, treat the waste water (most power stations already have one on site), it does not go into the oceans. If the flue gas is untreated, or has only a reduced amount of pollutants removed, then it reaches the oceans - and land - as Mother Nature condenses them after they leave the stack.
I hope that this clarifies some of your reader’s comments.