Alexander Bell, the founding father of the American telephone, once noted that “great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds”. Technological progress is indeed rarely achieved without cooperation and collaboration between a plethora of stakeholders, including academia, industry, research institutions and civil society. Fruitful results then offer to unlock the learning potential curve and allow for wider applications. This undoubtedly holds true in today’s quest for emission reducing solutions. In the case of carbon capture and storage (CCS), one of the key focus areas has still been on improving efficiency of the CO2 capture chain.

In full recognition of the value of multi-stakeholder collaboration, Bellona has teamed up with a range of actors within the so-called Chinese-European Emission-Reducing Solutions (CHEERS) project, with the overarching aim of improving the efficiency of the CO₂ capture chain, and subsequently helping the reduction of power sector CO₂ emissions.

In November last year, the CHEERS project was formally kicked-off, which will over the course of five years, look to develop, upscale and test a 2^nd generation chemical-looping technology in order to produce energy and steam with captured CO₂.

The aim of the project is to drastically reduce the efficiency drop of the CO₂ capture chain. The innovative concept is deemed capable of removing 96% of combustion-related CO₂ while eliminating capture losses to less than 4% (a 50% reduction from current levels of absorption techniques), except for the CO₂ compression work.

The system prototype demonstration, which is based on a fundamentally new fuel-conversion process synthesised from prior research and development actions over more than a decade, will be carried out at the Key Laboratory for Clean Combustion and Flue Gas Purification of the Sichuan Province, in Deyang, P.R. China.

Co-financed by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) and the Chinese industry members, the project seeks to make a major step towards large-scale carbon footprint reduction of power/steam generation system using heavy feed, namely petcoke. It is anticipated that a successful demonstration will pave the ground for a wider deployment of the CCS technology in the energy-intensive industry, especially processes hampered with combustion-related CO₂ such as cement, steel and chemicals production.

The 30 members and representatives of the consortium, comprised of nine parties, including: SINTEF Energi (coordinator, Trondheim, Norway), IFP Energies nouvelles (IFPEN) (Lyon, France), Tsinghua University (Beijing, China), SINTEF Industry (Oslo, Norway), Total (France), Dongfang Boiler Group (Zigong, China), Zhejiang University (Hangzhou, China), Politeknika Slaska (SILESIAN) (Gliwice, Poland), and Bellona (Brussels, Belgium).

The CHEERS consortium partners