1. Sustainability Problem

Energy and climate: in order to mitigate the climate impacts of burning fossil fuels, power plants capture carbon dioxide from flue gases for permanent storage or alternative uses. Amine-based and other liquid absorption methods are complex and have a high parasitic energy load (considerable energy is required to regenerate the material), so there is a need for highly efficient solid absorption materials.

2. Technology Article Summary

Article:
York chemists lead breakthrough in carbon capture
Published 7/04/2016 on University of York News at http://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2016/research/starbons-carbon-capture/

• Scientists at the University of York have developed a method for producing mesoporous carbon materials from waste biomass.
• The process involves the carbonization of polysaccharides by heating to high temperatures – creating materials which selectively bind CO2 from a gas stream, and are easily regenerated under vacuum.
• The properties of the “starbons” produced differ depending on the temperature and time applied to the biomass.
• Some starbons capture as much as 65% more carbon dioxide than conventional activated carbon.

3. Organizational Stakeholders

Starbons have already been commercialized for other applications, such as catalysis and chromatographic separations, but are not yet available for carbon capture. Stakeholders in this process will include:

• Researchers
• Starbon Technologies
• Owners and managers of power plants

4. Deployment

The next three stages in deploying this technology could be:

• UoY researchers and Starbon Technologies: characterize the optimal material, and commercially produce a starbon for carbon capture
• Power plants with solid-state carbon capture: phase in starbon to replace activated carbon
• Power plants with liquid-state carbon capture: investigate opportunities to redesign carbon capture systems to incorporate solid capture materials

See also:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201602226/full for the recent research paper.

http://www.starbon-technologies.com/ for information on the company and other applications of starbons.