StoppingClimateChange.com                                                                                                                                                                Skyscrubber.com 
    About   Enabling the coming rebuild of the world's electricity power plants to also make Climate Change go away.   Prolog    Second Front Page

We can begin bulk removal of Climate Changing CO2 from the air soon.*
(BECCS = BioEnergy Carbon Capture and Storage. A newly-patented power plant ideal for BECCS use is currently being test run as a 1/10 size (30mW) pilot plant. Toshiba will make a 300 megaWatt version of this plant. It should be available on the global power plant market in 2021.) 

                 
It's proving to be much more difficult to get the world's populations to decarbonize than was first thought.
This Website is suggesting a way we can take the bull by the horns to begin to stop Climate Change's growth now while waiting for the world's populations to decarbonize.
If we can dream it, we can build it. If we can put a man on the moon, we can end Climate Change. To that end, someone needs to constantly explore the possibility of using various configurations of today's emerging industrial technologies. (There is no connection between this website and 8 Rivers Capital.)

A Next Generation Carbon Capturing Power Plant Is Running As A 30 mW Pilot Plant In La Porte, Texas.
Toshiba's 300 megaWatt (mW) production version of this plant is due out in 2021.  300 mW is a large plant.  It's not too early to begin identifying sites, peripherals, and supply logistics.
It's running as a 1/10 size pilot plant to discover the "unknown unknowns" - is anything going to fail way early? - Can operators operate it 24/7/365? - It has components that have no proven predecessor device. - What will happen when they fail? - How do you restart it hot? - Hell, how do you start it cold?

A practical key for unlocking massive amounts of negative CO2 for removing Climate Change from the air is the recently-invented supercritical CO2 ALLAM CYCLE.   
What is really neat about the newly-invented CO2-driven Allam Cycle engine is that it is a fossil-fuel engine that keeps it's emission chemicals separate - they come out in different pipes: CO2 gas, Nitrogen gas, Argon gas, and tons of Liquid Water. 

INTRODUCTION: We are constantly being told we should plant more trees to pull climate-changing carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the air because trees turn the "C" in CO2 into wood carbon (cellulose), and lock it in for the life of the tree while releasing the two "Os" back into the air. Trees, of course, are carbon—if you burn them, each of the tree's carbons is re-combined with a couple of air's oxygens and voila!, you release carbon dioxide, a gas, back into the atmosphere.
So the downside of trees is that eventually the tree will die, the wood will decay, and the wood's "C" (Carbon) will be resurrected as CO2 gas by decay's adding two fresh "Os" from the air to it, and the CO2 rises back into the air from the tree's deadwood grave on the forest floor to make future Climate Change even worse than it would have been otherwise.

A better idea: Let's burn those trees in Allam Cycle engines to make electricity. This will unlock the climate-changing CO2 the trees have previously removed from the air. The Allam Cycle engine's liquefied CO2 emissions pipe can then inject the liquefied CO2 into deep underground porous strata layers where the CO2 would be re-locked underground forever.

More electricity has always been better for a country's economy. As fuel for electricity, more trees sequestered should be better for the environment.

  Using Allam Cycle Power Plants to Make Electricity Using Trees Planted To Remove Climate Change From The Air
WILL Make Negative CO2 to Cancel Out Positive Fossil CO2 Emissions (Climate Change).

Locate this new type of power plant over a CO2 disposal region, burn local trees planted to remove Climate Change CO2 from the air, sell the electricity to local and long-distance grids.

Equipment Pages  >   4 Biomass Handling and Preparation   5 Plasma Torch Gasifier For Wood-to-Syngas   6 Syngas Cleanup   7 Wood Syngas to Methane Upgrade   8 Allam BECCS Power Plant  9 Class VI CO2 Disposal Well    

     Click on small images to enlarge, click on "Browser Return <----" to return to full page.
IF WE WANT TO END CLIMATE CHANGE NOW, WE HAVE TO DO IT OURSELVES NOW.
The countries in the above pie image are rich enough to quickly switch their electricity production from coal to trees to clear the air.
Deployed widely enough, this simple system could remove CO2 emissions from the air faster than CO2 emissions can be made.

Consuming perhaps 200 million tons of trees a day worldwide, this might deliver 100 million tons of Negative CO2 worldwide every day to flat-line CO2 ppm. 
This is a way to use brute force Negative CO2 to overpower everyone's positive CO2 emissions while the world is working on ways to reduce those emissions.
This technology could null the CO2 in the air big-time.  As emissions are reduced, our trip back to a No Climate Change Planet Earth becomes faster and faster.

Carbon dioxide is a carbon atom attached to two oxygen atoms to form a CO2 molecule. When a tree grows, it captures a lot of CO2 molecules and then detaches the carbon atom from the CO2's oxygen atoms, discarding the oxygens back into the air. The carbon atoms are then used by the tree to assemble wood fiber. Almost half the weight of a tree are the carbon atoms. Later, when the tree is gasified and burned to make electricity, the burning process re-attaches a couple of oxygen atoms to each of the carbon atoms, producing an exhaust mix of CO2 and water as steam. Wood would not burn without this happening. As shown in this tiny diagram, making CO2 from wood using fire releases a heck of a lot of heat. (Click)    
The Allam cycle power plant has no smokestack. (Click)  Burning natural gas fuel in the Allam engine causes 3.25% of the CO2 produced to become excess. It is bled off the working fluid stream to be sequestered (stored forever) in the ground, eventually to become limestone, while retaining the remainder of the CO2 as the engine's working fluid. [In a steam engine power plant 100% of the working fluid - water - is recovered and reused.] In addition to the CO2 pipe coming out of the Allam engine, there are water (the combustion product), plus nitrogen and argon pipes (left over from extracting the combustion oxygen from the air). These are of industrial purity and can be sold. 
 
Toshiba will be making the Allam cycle plant's heavy equipment - the combustor (a device usually found in jet engines - there is no boiler), a strange-looking, rather small, single stage CO2+steam turbine , and a conventional electricity generator. One might consider this design to be a rocket engine (the combustor) connected directly to, and blasting directly into, a really strong steam turbine. Recall the white steam plume coming from space launch rockets? Toshiba plans on mass producing a large - 300 megaWatt(e) - power plant generator product. Power plants almost always come in at least a pair of generators. A pair of 300 megaWatt generators should be able to power a city with a population of about 1 million.

The world has over 50,000 coal and oil powered steam turbine engine power plants. Replacing about 6,000 of them with Allam "Skyscrubber" wood burning plants to end Climate Change along with tens of thousands of Allam coal burning power plant replacements (see below) to end their atmospheric CO2 emissions would go a long way toward stopping Climate Change.

This is disruptive technology at its best. Changing just the electricity part of the world may drastically reduce and alter the nature and number of other changes that are currently deemed necessary to mitigate Climate Change.

Success of this idea depends on the technology for gasifying a sufficient volume of trees into natural gas pipeline quality methane. The time has come for James Watt's 1772 steam cycle engine (which brought Climate Change along with powering the modern world) to make room for Rodney Allam's 2018 CO2 cycle engine (which possibly could stop Climate Change while not changing the modern world very much).

The intent for inventing the Allam Cycle was to make a very cost-efficient oxycombustion fossil fuel burning (i.e., natural gas, oil, coal, or lignite) electricity power plant that, by virtue of exploiting the energy advantages of CO2 as a working fluid, does not add to global air CO2 emissions and does not incur the heavy cost and energy penalties of traditional carbon capture and sequestration technologies.
 
The intent of this web site is to apply the Allam cycle power plant to an application that, in addition to making the world's electricity, also produces sufficient negative emissions to roll back Global Warming thereby extensively mitigating Climate Change.

We can make such a facility today with a plasma wood gasifier feeding a pair of today's conventional combined cycle gas turbines    in post-combustion BECCS mode, but you would also need to purchase, power, and maintain an expensive amount of big post-combustion carbon-capturing equipment and accept the large parasitic power loss and, at best, only about 90%, not 100%, of the CO2 would end up getting captured with the remainder escaping back into the air. 

1, Electrify everything possible with Allam cycle electricity. 2, Use carbon-neutral energy fuels for mobility and heat when we must.

A new Emission Unit? One "Emission Day" = 100 million tons of negative carbon dioxide. One "Emission Year" = 36.5 billion tons of CO2.  These are big numbers but do illustrate the fact that rolling Climate Change back to normal will be a staggeringly large task.
It will be a couple of years before the Toshiba Allam 300 megaWatt power plant hits the electricity market so we have some time to refine the details of a negative version of the Allam power plant for subtracting out all that CO2 that's causing Climate Change.

I have dubbed this combination of industrial equipment "Skyscrubber". Skyscrubber is becoming do-able and practical. Thousands will be needed. This equipment is undergoing rapid development by European manufacturers for use by the emerging "Green Natural Gas" systems industry being planned to replace the equipment currently being used to supply Europe's fossil natural gas grids.

It will literally take a world of work switching the world to make our electricity out of harvest-able wood planted all over the world.

                       
BioEnergy combined with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) is the only option for negative emissions.                                                                                                    

How it works: It begins by making carbon monoxide (CO) out of wood pellets (4) by heating them to several thousand degrees in a electric plasma torch heated gasifier (5), after which impurities are removed (6). The CO is then catalytically upgraded to methane (CH4) (7), commonly described as "Synthetic Natural Gas".

* The Allam Thermodynamic Cycle Is The Best Key To Date For Unlocking Negative Emissions From Wood To End Climate Change
   

Toshiba, NET Power, Chicago Bridge & Iron, Exelon, Air Liquide, and 8 Rivers Capital are working together to develop and commercialize the application of supercritical carbon dioxide power cycle technology for efficient emissions-free electric power generation.
The successful running of the Allam Thermodynamic Cycle pilot power plant in La Porte, Texas, provides solid evidence the Climate Change situation has changed for the better.
We can remove the excess CO2 we are putting in the air by making carbon-captured electricity from biomass syngas using the Allam Cycle in BECCS mode. This one change may be the quickest way to roll back Planet Earth's air CO2 to normal.

The Allam Cycle is a very new turbine technology that uses supercritical CO2 instead of steam as its working fluid. As of now, it is only running as a 1/10th size pilot plant in La Porte, Texas, since last November. So far, so good.
     The company:              https://www.netpower.com/technology/     https://www.netpower.com/news/      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFcbev1TkoU    
     CarbFix - CO2 Locked in the ground forever. Watch:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zDZmIDbDO0
     Descriptive Articles:     https://www.powermag.com/inside-net-power-gas-power-goes-supercritical/?mypower 

One has to be struck by how different the Allam Cycle engine is from it's long evolutionary line of internal combustion heat engine ancestors such as the Otto cycle, Diesel cycle, Brayton cycle, Lenoir cycle, Leclerc cycle, etc.
Lacking a boiler, it's combustor, connected directly to the turbine, is clearly descended from a liquid fuel rocket engine, on the other hand, it's turbine is a basic single-stage steam power plant turbine exhausting both steam and carbon dioxide into an exotic hotwell.  

"One promising route for oxy-combustion is the so called "Allam Cycle", technology that is based on a new thermodynamic cycle that "uses a high-pressure CO2 cycle that makes carbon capture part of the core power generation process" (NetPower, 2017). The pilot plant is under construction as of 2017. It uses a turbine that uses natural gas (methane), which is combusted with oxygen. The exhaust CO2 gets recycled, so the working fluid inside the turbine is CO2. The CO2 recycling process increases the efficiency of the process and it compensates the cost penalty. If proven successful, this technology can provide a substantial change in CCS economics."
- - - Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage: key issues and major challenges - Claire Nicolas*,§ , Y-H. Henry Chen* , Jennifer Morris* , Niven Winchester* , Sergey Paltsev*±,  * MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.

From what your author knows about carbon capture at this time, it looks as if the Allam cycle has it all over the other carbon capturing technologies out there and, if located above safely sequestable strata, it can provide the world with a bigger, cheaper, and cleaner carbon capture capability while being powered by a greater variety of fuels.

To be clear about the Allam Cycle engine's capabilities and possibilities: 
The Allam Cycle Engine is a fossil fuel combustion gas machine that runs in the Oxy-fuel Carbon Capture mode. It uses carbon dioxide rather than nitrogen as the combustion diluent. This means it is incapable of producing air-polluting nitrous oxides (NOx). Different versions will enable it to run on the fossil fuels Natural Gas, Oil, Coal, Lignite. It will also run on Biomass Syngas along with carbon-neutral liquid fuels containing sufficient thermal energy content such as ethanol, etc. This fuel flexibility assures every country in the world has forms of local energy (often rooted in coal or biomass) that can power it and thus obtain Climate Change clean electricity at a very economically desirable cost. Smaller than coal powered steam generators, upgrading existing coal power plant facilities with new replacement Allam machinery may be a possibility for cash-strapped countries.

The Allam Cycle electricity power plant will only be available from a single source, Toshiba, in a single size, 300 megaWatts(e), large enough to power 225,000 California standard I.S.O. houses.

This old electrical engineer may be over-enthusiastic because this is the most successful supercritical carbon dioxide power plant he has ever read about, but at this moment, It looks like the world's first power plant with enough megaWatt power and displacement capacity to punch holes in Climate Change simply by burning substantial amounts of wood and sequestering the emissions. The notion that 6,000 of them could gang up on Global Warming and actually suck it out of the air is very appealing.

So, the first thing that needs to be accomplished is the engineering necessary for building a wood gasifier and methanator with sufficient capacity to power a Toshiba Allam power plant at perhaps 70% of full load (maximum baseload). This is equipment item "0" on the Skyscrubber Systems sketch above.

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The other technologies needed to build Skyscrubber power plants

1.    http://plascotechnologies.com/  is offering the biomass processing technology for a version of the Skyscrubber power plant now.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YllIj_bzl5A 
2.    Also, check out plasma gasifier manufacturer AlterNRG:  http://www.alternrg.com/               http://www.alternrg.com/waste_to_energy/waste-to-liquids/ 

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How many trees will it take to remove 100 million tons of CO2 from the air per day (all sites combined)?

                    
If you want to capture large volumes of air's CO2 carbon quickly, you can't beat wood biomass. 200 one-million ton trains a day would stop Climate Change.
 The nascent Toshiba-built Allam Cycle 300 megaWatt power plant is big electricity. Instead of a train-a-day of coal, it will be at least train-a-day of green wood pellets or chips to each power plant.
The world made 23,816 TW-h (TerraWatt-Hours) or 23,816,000,000 MW-h (MegaWatt-hours) of electricity in 2017.
How many 300 MW Toshiba-Allam power plants burning how many tons of green wood a year do we need to make that much electricity?
 

This is a diagram of the burning of methane.    

Making biomethane in relatively small quantities from many diverse biosources, i.e., landfill, agwaste, and other similar biomass emissions is relatively easy and becoming common. Making biomethane from green wood in massive power plant quantities that exactly duplicates the relatively high energy content and purity of fossil natural gas (methane) is a work-in-progress at many fuel companies that see the handwriting on the wall.

Currently, biogas production plants are typically farms or waste treatment units where methane from agricultural by-products and waste is used to produce heat or combined heat and power (CHP). Due to its low energy density, this methane feedstock tends to be processed and consumed locally. Power plants that are burning wood to reduce their CO2 emissions are usually substituting cleaner wood pellets for coal to qualify for CO2 emissions reduction subsidies.

A recent tree census indicates there may be 3 trillion trees in the world. That's 3 thousand billion trees. A billion is a thousand million. Once you have an efficient way to store air's CO2 safely forever underground, storing CO2 forever in trees above ground becomes a very bad idea and far more Climate Change dangerous. Eventually the CO2 will escape back into the air and make Climate Change even worse. We have to think of biomass such as trees as vegetables, not hallowed repositories of captured CO2. A map published in Sept 2015 NATURE magazine reveals that the global number of trees is approximately 3.04 trillion, an order of magnitude higher than the previous accepted estimate.

At some point a tree's CO2 gathering performance reaches it's maximum and begins to decline. It will eventually die and become mankind's climate enemy, its decaying CO2 returning to the air as surely as if it were burning.

Trees that have reached optimal CO2-gathering growth should be harvested immediately and replaced with vigorously growing young trees to continue the process of gathering as much CO2 from the air as rapidly as possible. The ground minerals recovered in the gasification clean-up process will be recycled as fertilizers and redistributed in the forest farms (stands).

The harvested trees, along with other available biomass (perhaps city garbage, sewage, agwaste, forest trimmings, etc.) would then be pelletized and their molecules broken down by a electrical plasma torch that makes Sun-hot heat.  Heat this hot breaks the atomic bonds that hold molecules together, creating free carbon atoms and other atoms that can be sorted out and reassembled into syngas (synthetic methane gas) fuel for the Allam electricity power plant and remineralizing fertilizer for tree farms.

Getting the job of building thousands of Skyscrubber facilities done quickly: Once the world realizes it needs thousands of Allam BECCS systems, everyone will want them NOW. In times of emergency, manufacture of critical technologies equipment can be licensed to multiple capable, but competing companies to quickly produce thousands of identical machines simultaneously. Led by Franklin Roosevelt, the United States did a masterful job of turning the Free World into the "Arsenal of Democracy" during World War II through cross-licensing of war-related patents and other technologies. The United States is again in the position to, this time, invent, produce, and manufacture the tools that will save the world from Climate Change.

The United States alone built 6,768 full-size ocean-going ships and about 300,000 airplanes over 4 years during World War II. With the Allam Cycle electricity power plant, bringing Climate Change under control is a much smaller task.

There is no reason the same wartime crisis production strategies cannot be used to quickly end the Climate Change Crisis.

Cities = power plants.   Thousands of cities, thousands of Skyscrubbers.

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ELECTRICITY CARBON TAXES and CARBON CAPTURE and SEQUESTRATION INCENTIVES
Information about the government's different Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Acts (Courtesy of Climate Change Working Group):

First, here's a link to the bill itself: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/763 
Second, for anyone without the time or interest to read the entire bill, a link to a "road map" of the bill's contents, so the most relevant sections can be found with some ease:  https://community.citizensclimatelobby.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Section-by-Section-Analysis-Energy-Innovation-Act-2019.pdf 
Third, here's a link to Citizen's Climate Lobby's website about the bill, which also allows a reader to see who has already endorsed the bill and what the press is saying about it. It includes an endorsement tool: https://energyinnovationact.org/ 
Finally, for anyone wanting to compare this bill to other carbon pricing bills, an assessment that compares this bill (sponsored by Rep. Ted Deutch of Florida and therefore called the Deutch bill in the analysis) to others:   https://energypolicy.columbia.edu/research/commentary/how-bipartisan-energy-innovation-and-carbon-dividend-act-compares-other-carbon-tax-proposals

All these carbon tax fees raise a very serious question:
Q. How much per ton of CO2 is going to be refunded by the government to the operators of the above Skyscrubber power plants to establish and operate a carbon dioxide disposal well on their own property?

A. Deutch bill: This section amends the Tax Code (Title 26) by adding the following subsections: Subtitle L - "Carbon Dividends and Carbon Fee", Sec. 9906 - Carbon Capture and Sequestration:

"Provides a refund of Carbon Fee paid when qualified carbon dioxide is captured and sequestered in a safe and permanent manner. Requires establishment of sound criteria for safe and permanent sequestration. Only CO2 from covered fuels, and only rebate for amount likely to remain sequestered."

- - - In the United States there are now 2 big carbon capture incentives: A recently expanded federal tax credit for captured CO2 and California’s new law requiring 100% of its electricity come from carbon-free sources by 2045.

In the U.S., carbon capture has led to the formation of extraordinary alliances. In 2018, a tax credit known as 45Q—so named for the relevant provision in the law—was revised to provide higher incentives for CCS with support from congressional lawmakers of both parties, big oil and gas, industry, and environmentalists. Over time, it will ramp up to $50 per metric ton of carbon stored geologically and $35 per metric ton of carbon stored through enhanced oil recovery, provided projects commence construction by the end of 2023. - Brad Page, Bloomberg Environment, Posted May 13, 2019, 6:00 AM

The LCFS and CCS Protocol: An Overview for Policymakers and Project Developers - California - pdf.  If building the above Skyscrubber Power Plant interests you, you need this document.

"Technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined." -  ( From Prologue )

One objective of this website is to communicate that the Climate Change crisis resembles the horseshit crisis described in the Prologue's story. 

Here’s an analogy that Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who helped compile some of the climate research data for the World Bank, likes to use.
"Take the human body. If your temperature rises 2°C, you have a significant fever. If it rises 4°C or 6°C you can die. It’s not a linear change."

Comment: This web site content was initially inspired by the PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) paper: "Geospatial analysis of near-term potential for carbon-negative bioenergy in the United States" by Ejeong Baik, et al, 2/12/2018. Written largely by people from the Department of Energy Resources Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305. It's an open access document containing 44 BECCS and negative emissions technical references, you can Google it and download it as a pdf. They identified 1,000 U.S. counties where power plant, fuel, and CO2 storage could be collocated. Written before the advent of Toshiba's commercial size Allam Thermodynamic Cycle plant, they talked about relatively tiny biofuel powered power plants about the size of the Allam Pilot plant.   pdf:  https://www.pnas.org/content/115/13/3290 

Your website author is an electrical/electronic control systems engineer with a few years in several power plant designs and a lot of years in heavy industrial energy and control systems. Thermodynamic advances such as the Allam Cycle typically come to the world once a century and typically offer breakthrough opportunities in what they enable mankind to do. In the Allam Cycle's case, it delivers its carbon dioxide emission in a pure form ready for underground storage forever (sequestration).  The fossil fuel industry has already engineered coal and lignite fuel natural gas methanisation front end modules to this natural-gas-only Allam cycle as a way to address the damage their fuels inflict on the environment today in hopes of retaining their future markets rather than see their fuels outlawed.

There is wood-to-natural gas pipeline technology being developed both in the U.S. and Europe as way to replace fossil natural combustion gas [methane] with carbon neutral combustion gas [green methane]. The green gas volumes to be produced by commercial gas main technology suggest the volumes of carbon dioxide gas that must be removed from the air to restore Planet Earth's environment to it's former self. Green gas burned in the air is only carbon-neutral. Green Gas burned in an Allam Cycle power plant and sequestered forever in the ground is the removal of carbon from the air forever or carbon negative.

So, a firewood front end consisting of commercial green gas main pipeline size equipment combined with a Toshiba power plant size Allam Cycle engine, ought to make a serious dent in the amount of Global Warming, Climate Changing, CO2 in the air when multiplied by the number of coal and gas power plants already covering the world.

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  Disclaimer: This website is energy talk by an engineer exploring Climate Change's opportunities for creating a clean combustion fuel future - not professional engineering advice.