Drax is partnering with University of Leeds spinout C-Capture to undertake a £400,000 carbon capture and storage pilot at its North Yorkshire power station.
The project aims to determine if C-Capture’s solvent works with biomass flue gas.
If it does, it could pave the way for further projects to reduce carbon emissions from the power station, the UK’s largest biomass burner.
Drax Group CEO Will Gardiner said the company aimed to test different technologies on its four biomass units that “could allow Drax … to deliver negative emissions”.
Chris Rayner, founder of C-Capture and Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Leeds, said: “We have developed fundamentally new chemistry to capture CO2 and have shown that it should be suitable for capturing the carbon produced from bioenergy processes.
“The key part is now to move it from our own facilities and into the real world at Drax. Through the pilot scheme we aim to demonstrate that the technology we’ve developed is a cost-effective way to achieve one of the holy grails of CO2 emissions strategies – negative emissions in power production, which is where we believe the potential CO2 emissions reductions are likely to be the greatest.”
The project comes as gas firms outline plans to develop carbon capture and storage to enable them to take most of the emissions from hydrogen production and bury them in Liverpool Bay.
Drax was involved in the original White Rose CCS project with BOC and Alstom, but pulled out two months before government axed funding in late 2015.
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