Hunosa studies capturing and selling CO2 to make La Pereda more profitable

by time news

On October 25, Hunosa obtained 50 megawatts of renewable energy in the auction called by the Ministry for Ecological Transition. With this award, the public coal company will transform its thermal power plant in La Pereda (Mieres) into a biomass plant, replacing the burning of coal and waste dumps with forest waste. To increase the profitability of the plant, which is expected to be ready in 2024, Hunosa is studying the incorporation of CO2 capture systems, which can then be marketed for the manufacture of biofuels such as bioethanol or biodiesel.

A decade ago Hunosa launched, with the collaboration of Endesa and the Carbon Institute (Incar, dependent on the CSIC), a pilot plant in La Pereda for the capture of carbon dioxide, along the lines of other European projects in search of the so-called “clean coal”. Currently, the plant has the backing of 15 million euros from the European initiative “CaLby2030”, whose objective is that by 2030 the commercial use of these facilities will be generalized through the calcium carbonate loop technique (CCL, for its acronym in English).

To date, it has not been possible to do anything with the captured CO2 other than store it underground, but scientific advances in recent years have made it possible to manufacture biofuels precisely from this gas, within the framework of the so-called circular economy. This opens up a business niche that, according to sources close to Hunosa, would serve to increase the profitability of La Pereda and that its income does not depend solely on energy production with biomass.

In Spain there are more projects along these lines, such as the biomass plant managed by Enso (formerly Acek Renovables) in Garray (Soria), which has a capacity of 17 megawatts. According to the company, the capture “will prevent the emission into the atmosphere of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide per year, in addition to avoiding 100,000 kilometers a year of CO2 in road transport” to its customers.

Likewise, science investigates the use of CO2 for the generation of biofuels. For example, the European project “Bac-To-Fuel”, coordinated by the chemist Manuel Arturo López Quintela, from the University of Santiago de Compostela. The work involves the use of genetically modified bacteria to convert carbon dioxide, along with green hydrogen, into a renewable biofuel.

For their part, scientists from the Rovira i Virgili University (Tarragona) have invented a system that replicates the photosynthesis of plants and uses the CO2 absorbed to manufacture methanol.

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