A fundamental step in the R&D process is to assess alternative pathways for achieving a technical goal. The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy is currently investigating technologies that can capture 90% of the CO₂ emitted by power plants while increasing electricity costs by no more than 10%. As a part of this research effort, researchers from the National Energy Technology Laboratory's Carbon Sequestration Science Focus Area are conducting laboratory-scale tests on fabricating and using hybrid alumina/organosilane membrane materials to capture CO₂ from IGCC power plants.

Energetics is serving as lead investigator and author of a paper about this research. We are part of a team that is comparing the economics of a plant with a membrane separation unit to those of a similar plant using the commercially available Selexol process. Our study shows that the membrane will become technically and economically competitive with Selexol for CO₂ mitigation when it achieves a CO₂:H₂ membrane selectivity of 60:1 and an installed membrane cost of $500/m² or less.

Energetics is serving as lead investigator and author of a paper analyzing new membrane materials for CO₂ capture and sequestration in IGCC power plants.