China’s carbon-peak and neutrality goals are a step closer to being realised, with the opening of a massive carbon-capture project in our neck of the woods; a somewhat small, but significant step at capping emissions in the country’s coal-fired, power-generation sector.
China Energy announced on Friday, 2 June, that full-capacity operations are under way at the largest carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) facility in Asia. And it’s right here in our very own Jiangsu Province, in Taizhou to be precise.
The facility is able to capture and consume up to 500,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually.
The Taizhou Power Plant has four million-kilowatt generators units; the CCUS project uses the flue gasses from Unit 4 as its raw material for what is the largest CO2 compressor in China.
Sucking in those exhaust gasses, the facility purifies the CO2 within to over 99 percent, and then utilises and consumes it in industrial and food processing scenarios.
In a report by Guangming Net, Liu Jiandong, Chief Engineer of the National Energy Group’s Jiangsu Taizhou Power Plant, said, “On our side, there are shipyards, oil fields, chemical plants and other enterprises with a high demand for CO2”.
“In the early stage, we proactively contacted park enterprises and locked in an annual sales volume of 500,000 tonnes. That’s 400,000 tons of industrial CO2 and 100,000 tons of food processing CO2”, said Liu.
The new facility in Taizhou is an entirely-domestic affair, 100-percent designed, manufactured and installed by China. It is also the most technologically-advanced CCUS project in the Asian thermal power industry to date.
Overall, China seeks a CO2 emissions peak by 2030 and to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.
China’s annual CO2 emissions stand at around 13 billion tonnes, of which that derived from coal power accounts for more than 40 percent. Given the half-million tonnes per year capacity of the Taizhou plant, that all means we just need another thousand like it to negate China’s coal consumption.
