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AnonTechie writes:

Beijing Unveils Supercritical CO2 Turbine That Could Upend Power Tech

China has launched the world's first carbon dioxide–based power generator, using supercritical CO2 instead of steam to produce electricity with over 50% efficiency.

The system harnesses industrial waste heat—such as from steel plants—and needs no water or fuel, reducing maintenance and equipment complexity.

Compact and versatile, the technology could revolutionize carbon capture by using CO2 for profitable energy generation, potentially lowering emissions and storage costs.

China has launched a first-of-its-kind power generator that works with carbon dioxide instead of steam, like traditional generators in power plants. Perhaps more importantly, however, the new generator works with waste heat and boasts a much higher efficiency than existing ones at doing that. According to the company that designed it, the generator is the start of a new era, the South China Morning Post reported.

Normally, thermal power generators work in one of two ways, both relying on heat to turn a turbine. In coal power plants, the burning of coal heats up water until it vaporizes, the vapor then being directed to the turbines that generate electricity. In gas-fired power plants, the turbines are activated by the heat, generated from the compression of gas and its subsequent heating.

Unlike them, the SCMP reported, the new generator uses carbon dioxide in a supercritical state, meaning the compound is subjected to a certain pressure and a certain temperature, which makes it behave simultaneously like a gas and a liquid. The state is called supercritical, hence the whole generator is called a supercritical one. Conveniently, waste heat from sintering in steelmaking plants could reach as much as 700 degrees Celsius—so the inventors of the new generator connected it to one steel works, and to the grid. Even more conveniently, the supercritical state of CO2 does not, in fact, require this high of a temperature.

Original Submission