[socialism_stinX]

There is a market for a lot of the CO2 produced by power plants. But they don’t have a low-cost process to extract the CO2 from all the nitrogen and other gases and soot that’s in the exhaust stream. So they can’t produce it cheaply enough for the oil EOR industry. Also, the existing power plants weren’t designed to remove the CO2 from the exhaust stream, so it would take a lot of costly retrofitting of machinery and pipes to extract the CO2 for sale.

This process sounds very promising, especially the claims of extra efficiency at converting the energy in the natural gas to electric power. But I don’t know where developing countries that don’t have much of an oil industry (like India) are going to put all the CO2 extracted by this new process. They could just skip that step, release the CO2 into the air, and just take advantage of the higher efficiency (which should lower emissions of everything, including CO2, compared to conventional power plants.)

[norwaypinesavage]

"This process sounds very promising, especially the claims of extra efficiency at converting the energy in the natural gas to electric power."

It only "sounds" promising because not all of the "facts" are true.

[Svartalfiar]

This process sounds very promising, especially the claims of extra efficiency at converting the energy in the natural gas to electric power. But I don’t know where developing countries that don’t have much of an oil industry (like India) are going to put all the CO2 extracted by this new process. They could just skip that step, release the CO2 into the air, and just take advantage of the higher efficiency (which should lower emissions of everything, including CO2, compared to conventional power plants.)

Well sure, ANY combustion process is going to be more efficient if you use pure oxygen as opposed to 21% oxygen (air). That's just basic chemistry. And, lack of nitrogen (78% air) will of course mean you don't have any nitrous emissions.

That said, what's the cost to bottle all this pure oxygen they need for their fancy machine? Is it cheaper / more efficient than just using current power generators? How would a developing country manage to do this? Is it actually cost effective? Pure oxygen isn't that cheap...