The desperate drive to continue burning coal without spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere continues this week with the announcement the E.ON and Siemens are putting a pilot CO2 capture plant into operation at E.ON’s Staudinger power plant in Grosskrotzenburg, Germany.

The pilot facility aims to put a lab-proven capture process into action under real operating conditions at Staudinger Unit 5. The pilot plant will be operated with part of the flue gas from Unit 5. E.ON and Siemens intend to run the pilot plant until the end of 2010. The results achieved and the operating performance of the pilot plant will serve as the basis for large-scale demonstration plants, which are set to begin operations in the middle of the next decade.

“The challenge is to attain a significant reduction in the CO2 emissions associated with the combustion of fossil fuels,” said Michael Suess, CEO of the Fossil Power Generation Division of Siemens Energy. “In this context CO2 capture and storage technologies will be of decisive importance. These technologies are available but they have to be tested for deployment in large plants, developed further and brought to market readiness. The pilot plant in the Staudinger power plant will bring us a decisive step forward here.”

E.ON plans to launch industrial-scale CO2 capture and storage at its coal-fired power plants starting in 2020, according to Bernhard Fischer, E.ON’s CTO and a member of the managing board of E.ON Energie AG.

“With the post-combustion process we are focusing on an highly promising CO2 capture technology, which can be backfitted in existing power plants,” Fischer said.

The project is being sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Economics as part of the government’s effort to promote research and development in low-CO2 power plant technologies.

In the lab, Siemen’s post-combustion capture process uses special cleaning agents to remove more than 90 per cent of the CO2 from a power plant’s flue gas. The pilot plant at the Staudinger will test the cleaning agent’s long-term chemical stability and the efficiency of the process. During the pilot operations, Siemens and E.ON also hope to further optimise the technology in terms of energy consumption.

“Our process is characterised among other things by good environmental compatibility, comparatively low energy consumption and only very low loss of the cleaning agent used,” Suess said.

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