NETL presents the latest edition of its publication that showcases research on emerging energy technologies. NETL Edge shares the latest developments the Lab’s mission to drive innovation and deliver solutions for an environmentally sustainable and prosperous energy future.
Photo Caption: Image courtesy of Gas Technology Institute. The new STEP facility, supported by NETL, will house a desk-sized sCO2 turbine that could power 10,000 homes.
Turbines are important machines in our nation’s fleet of fossil-fueled power plants, extracting energy from domestic resources and converting it into the electricity we depend on. Turbines can also be key players in conserving resources because they can provide clean energy by using less fuel and generating fewer emissions.
Because supercritical CO2 (sCO2) power cycles can improve thermal efficiency and enable energy production from domestic fossil fuels with responsible stewardship of the environment, NETL researchers are aggressively investigating how to maximize the service life of materials in sCO2environments.
NETL researchers are studying supercritical CO2 power cycles to improve thermal efficiency and alleviate adverse environmental impacts of using fossil fuels to generate power—work they hope will someday result in zero emissions and record-breaking efficiencies. This work features a special type of combustion known as oxyfuel combustion (or oxycombustion), in which oxygen rather than ambient air is used to combust fuel. The resulting flue gas is composed of highly concentrated, or supercritical, CO2.
