Energy and Electricity - Introduction to Carbon Capture and Sequestration - page 5

beautiful examples of this intuition put into action to make new materi-
als to capture CO 2 . Chemists have the entire periodic table at their
disposal to make the most innovative materials. Certainly, we would
like the world's most brilliant chemists to use their impressive tools to
make a novel material such that every atom is placed at exactly the
right position to efficiently capture CO 2 from flue gas. At first sight this
challenge looks very similar to finding the perfect drug, in which each
atom is put at exactly the right position to intercept a virus or bacte-
rium. We will argue that carbon capture research, however, is bur-
dened by an additional constraint: the enormous scale of energy
production.
This may sound somewhat abstract, so let us give an example.
Suppose your start-up company has come up with the perfect material
to capture CO 2 . Of course, you keep the exact formula of your material
secret, but you have many CEOs of the world's leading electricity com-
panies lined up to build a carbon capture unit next to their power plants.
In fact, your material is so successful that 80% of all power plants in the
world would like to implement CCS based on your material. This looks
like the dream of any start-up until you realize how much of your material
needs to be synthesized. The scale of the energy landscape is gigantic,
so if your magic capture material contains an element that is not suffi-
ciently abundant, then no matter how superior your carbon capture
chemistry might be, your company will fail because the solution you
deliver is not sustainable.
The chemical sciences in the 21 st century invoke modern sensibilities
for the design of materials, with particular attention to the sources of raw
materials, their abundance, the impact on the environment to secure
them, and the role raw materials sourcing plays in political, social, and
economic structures worldwide. This is particularly striking for the case
of carbon capture, where proposed innovations are intimately coupled
with energy production. The implications of these innovations are gigan-
tic: gigantic in volume, gigantic in environmental impact, gigantic in
costs, in fact gigantic in any aspect one can imagine.
To get some intuition about the scale on which we use energy, let us
ask some very simple questions:
1. How much CO 2 do we produce at the moment?
2. How much CO 2 will be produced 1, 5, or 30 years from now?