Enlarge (credit: Argonne National Lab)
On Monday, the XPrize organization announced that it had selected 10 finalists for its NRG COSIA Carbon Competition. These finalists will be given space near a power plant and pipes that will deliver some of the plant’s carbon-dioxide-rich exhaust. It’s up to the competitors to turn that carbon dioxide into marketable products.
For the finalists, those products range from concrete to carbon nanotubes. To get a better overview of the technologies and the competition itself, we talked with Marcius Extavour, the XPrize’s senior director of energy and resources.
Capture, no storage
The world remains committed to fossil fuels, despite our increasing knowledge of the risks they pose. These risks have raised interest in the idea of carbon capture and storage. Rather than shut down our fossil-fuel-burning hardware and all the infrastructure that feeds it, we simply remove the carbon dioxide from the plant’s exhaust, placing it in either long-term storage or reacting it with rocks to lock it away indefinitely.
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Source: Ars Technica – Putting CO₂ to use: 10 finalists named for Carbon XPrize