$8.7 million awarded to Canadian researchers by Carbon Management Canada
Author: Research In Action Online
Source: University of Calgary
Publish Date: Wednesday, October 13, 2010
By Ruth Klinkhammer
$8.7 million was recently awarded to Canadian university researchers, including those at the University of Calgary, by Carbon Management Canada (CMC) Inc., a federal Network of Centres of Excellence headquartered at the U of C.
CMC is network of close to 100 researchers at 21 universities that funds research into technologies and policies to help reduce carbon emissions in the upstream fossil fuel industry. Headed by Scientific Director Steve Larter, Canada Research Chair in Petroleum Geology at the U of C and a professor in the Department of Geoscience, the fledgling network has just issued a second call for proposals (see www.carbonmanagement.ca for details).
"We are very excited by the research happening across Canada and also here on campus. It furthers our mandate to fund bold, innovative research to develop scalable technologies and policy to actually reduce carbon emissions in the fossil fuel industry," says Larter.
The 18 projects that were funded are varied and range, for example, from development of more carbon efficient ways to recover bitumen to studying the storage of CO2 in underground reservoir, to developing a practical international regulatory framework for carbon management. More exotic microbial and geoengineering technologies are also being examined as are the social drivers impacting policy, innovation and large-scale technology deployments.
Josephine Hill, professor in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering and Zandmer/Canada Research Chair in Hydrogen and Catalysis, and researchers from the universities of British Columbia, Western Ontario, Laval and Ottawa, were awarded $1.6 million to study ways to improve fossil fuel gasification processes. "You can reduce CO2 if you make processes more efficient," says Hill, lead researcher on the project. Lowering the temperature at which gasification takes place makes the process less energy intensive, thereby reducing the amount of CO2 produced.
Hill is working with feedstocks like coal or the relatively unusable petcoke – a petroleum production byproduct currently stockpiled in large amounts. "You can use petcoke – it still has energy generation potential. But you want to use it in a more sustainable way," says Hill.
CMC encourages collaboration between researchers, and Hill's work is a prime example of what the network aims to achieve. Not only does her project involve eight researchers at six universities and Natural Resources Canada, there are also direct links between the gasification project and ways to remove concentrated CO2 from the gasification process being researched at U of C and elsewhere.
Captured CO2 needs to be at least 90 per cent pure before it can be stored underground or used for enhanced oil recovery. Nader Mahinpey, a chemical and petroleum engineering professor at the U of C whose multi-university team received $1.069 million, is developing a multi-step process in which carbon is adsorbed onto novel sorbents in one reactor and then extracted as concentrated CO2 from a second reactor.
The projects are working hand-in-hand with other projects in the network and will hopefully dovetail into one single gasification system that can be commercialized.
This kind of networking and collaboration will help researchers achieve results they individually could not and, says Mahinpey, it wouldn't be possible without CMC. "This is the very best way to collaborate and would not be possible without a central organization."
Related News