| August 2007 |
| Ceramic could cut gas emissions - 3 August Scientists have made tiny tubes of an advanced ceramic that have the special property of filtering oxygen out of the air. These tubes could provide the key to cutting almost to zero greenhouse-gas emissions from power stations. Conventional gas-fired power stations burn methane in a stream of air to obtain heat for conversion into electricity. Such power stations emit their waste gases, including carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides - into the atmosphere, as the cost of separating harmful gases from the innocuous ones is uneconomic. Engineers at Newcastle University in the UK have discovered that ceramic tubes made out of lanthanum strontium cobalt ferric oxide (LSCF) used in the combustion chamber would allow only the oxygen component of air to reach the methane. That would result in the production of almost pure carbon dioxide and steam, which can easily be separated. The steam would be condensed out as water, and the carbon dioxide could be then transformed into a variety of chemicals with commercial potential or pumped into long-term underground storage.
|