Taking the Carbon Out of Coal

A company called SCS thinks it can use coal to generate electricity while cutting down 90% on carbon emissions — and still make a profit. The company's PurGen plant, which would be located on the site where an old Dow Chemical plant used to stand near the New Jersey Turnpike in Linden, NJ, would use a technology called carbon capture and storage, or CCS. Carbon dioxide coming from the coal would be captured and pumped in liquid form deep underground, where it would — presumably — stay. To continue using coal while achieving an 83% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, as called for in proposed legislation being discussed in Congress, will require increasing amounts of CCS in the coming decades. The PurGen plant would not burn coal, but rather turn it into hydrogen through a process that generates a stream of pure CO2 as a by-product. The hydrogen would be burned to make electricity with very little air pollution — but only when the demand for electricity is high, and the plant can get a good price. At times when demand is low, the hydrogen would be diverted and converted on-site into the chemical urea, used to make fertilizer. The storage part of SCS's plan involves building a two-foot-diameter pipeline to carry liquefied CO2 from the plant, under the Arthur Kill — a waterway separating New Jersey from Staten Island — and 140 miles out to a point on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, where it would be injected and stored about 8000 ft. beneath the sea floor in a ...
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This animation from Mcgrawhill shows how sodium potassium exchange occurs through the membrane by active transport through a pump....