Developing a cheap and effective technology to scrub clean the emissions spewing forth from thousands of factory smoke stacks around the world would go a long ways toward tackling global warming. With coal-powered utilities likely to continue mushrooming at a steady rate in rapidly developing countries like China and India, finding a way to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions has become a clear priority.
The aptly named Wow Energy may have just invented the technology necessary to help accomplish that challenging objective. Its proprietary technology, dubbed Wow-Clean, is superior to that of its competitors in one main respect: in addition to removing carbon dioxide from emissions, it also tackles sulphur, nitrogen and mercury. In recent tests conducted by a third party, Wow's technology was shown to remove 85 - 95% of heavy metal pollutants and up to 85% of carbon dioxide from emissions, compared with other scrubbers, whose technologies only removed an average of 50 - 60% of mercury from emissions.
The technology works by first cooling the emissions and then adding chemicals to allow them to be converted into water soluble, non-polluting compounds and solid particles that can then be washed out. It is highly versatile: it can be installed on coal-fired power plants, furnaces, incinerators, gasifiers, gas turbines and a bevy of other utilities.
By combining several scrubbing technologies into one, Wow-Clean is more efficient than its rivals, and cheaper as well. With costs ranging between $22 and $25 million for a typical 250 megawatt power plant, Wow's technology is about as expensive as that of single pollutant scrubbers, a clear advantage in an increasingly competitive market.
"This technology can make coal a clean and pollution-free fuel and allow industry to upgrade existing electrical generating units rather than build new, expensive and unproven power plants to supply the world's demands for clean power," said Daniel Stringer, Wow's chairman and the inventor of its breakthrough technology.
Via ::Financial Times: Tough task of getting polluters to come clean (newspaper)
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