Capturing CO2 with C-Capture Amanda Doyle speaks to Chris Rayner,founder of C-Capture,about the company's environmentally friendly solvent technology

摘要

C-CAPTURE started as a spinout from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Leeds,UK in 2009 and is now working on the carbon capture project at Drax Power Station in Yorkshire.I spoke to Chris Rayner,founder of C-Capture,about the company's environmentally friendly solvent technology,the project at Drax,and plans for the future.Rayner is a Professor of Organic Chemistry at Leeds and around 20 years ago,he got involved with research looking at supercritical CO2 as a solvent for extracting natural products,specifically an anti-cancer agent called Taxol which occurs naturally in yew trees.However,it wasn't commercially viable in the long term and they moved on to studying chemical reactions in supercritical CO2,which then led to work on reactions of CO2 at atmospheric pressure.They started work on reactions of CO2 with amines related to potential drug molecules,and through this became interested in carbon capture and storage.Amine-CO2 chemistry is well established and was first used in natural gas sweetening in the 1930s."We wanted to really look at[amine-CO2 chemistry]in more detail and thought there must be a better way to remove CO2 exploiting our increased understanding of chemistry.We set up C-Capture in 2009 to actually look at some new methods in a lot more detail,"says Rayner.