Californian fuel cell specialist Bloom Energy has formed a carbon capture partnership with Chart Industries, through which the parties will utilise natural gas and fuel cells to generate near-zero-carbon power.
Chart Industries will employ its technology to process Bloom Energy’s high-purity carbon dioxide (CO2) exhaust stream into outputs that are ready for utilisation or sequestration.
Efficient carbon capture depends on the purity of CO2 in the exhaust stream, which varies widely across power generation technologies.
Conventional technologies that generate electricity from natural gas through combustion produce exhaust streams with around 5% CO2, making it more complex and costly to capture.
Bloom Energy’s high-temperature fuel cell technology, on the other hand, converts natural gas without combustion, yielding a CO2-rich stream that has 15 times lower mass flow and ten times the CO2 concentration.
KR Sridhar, founder, Chairman, and CEO of Bloom Energy, said the partnership hopes to demonstrate that cost-effective, onsite baseload power from natural gas with carbon capture is feasible at scale.
“For energy-intensive industries like data centres and large manufacturers, this will provide a path to reliable, scalable power while significantly reducing carbon emissions.”
According to Morgan Stanley, more than 500 million tonnes per annum of carbon storage capacity is expected to come online within the next five years.
Chart Industries has been in the carbon capture space for several years and has several technologies related to the process. In the past few years, it has formed multiple global partnerships in the space.
On its latest venture, Jill Evanko, CEO of Chart, said, “We are excited to bring our expertise to Bloom and its unique platform, which is capable of producing reliable power and a concentrated CO2 stream.”
“Working with a market leader in solid oxide fuel cells, we see exciting opportunities for our partnership in both sequestration and utilisation markets. We are already working on projects where the captured CO2 will be utilised in the food and beverage industry.”
