It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, September 05, 2021
Edmonton business owners reward vaccinated staff following province’s $100 incentive for unvaccinated
By Chris Chacon Global News Posted September 4, 2021
To incentivize Albertans who have not yet received their first or second COVID-19 vaccine shot, the Alberta government will give you a one-time payment of $100. But with that cash only being offered to the unvaccinated or those needing a second dose, one Edmonton business owner has taken matters into his own hands to give back to those who already have both their shots. Chris Chacon reports
To incentivize Albertans who have not yet received their first or second COVID-19 vaccine shot, the Alberta government will give you a one-time payment of $100.
But with that cash only being offered to a select number of people, one Edmonton business owner has taken matters into his own hands to give back to those who already have both their shots.
It’s a contrast to the incentive announced Friday by the province for unvaccinated Albertans or people needing a second dose.
People 18 or older who get an approved COVID-19 vaccine between Sept. 3 and Oct. 14 will get a $100 debit card.
“I felt bad for my staff having asked them to make sure they are protected, that they protect the rest of society out there and that they are not getting rewarded,” Bryenton said.
University of Calgary health law and policy associate professor Lorian Hardcastle said she understands the need for businesses owners who want to reward vaccinated employees, but that responsibility ultimately lies elsewhere.
“We now have this patchwork system where we have business owners and others trying to fill in gaps that should have been filled by the government,” Hardcastle said.
Hardcastle said this latest incentive may slightly boost vaccination rates, but its impacts are difficult to know.
Bryenton is challenging other businesses capable of rewarding their vaccinated employees to do so.
“I thought it was an amazing idea, so I told him I was going to jump on board, and I’m going to do the same thing,” Kingsgate Automotives owner Wayne Paulsen said after learning about what Bryenton has done for this staff.
Paulsen said it was an easy choice to want to recognize employees who got vaccinated and helped many struggling businesses stay open.
“They deserve a lot more because they’ve sacrificed a lot over the last almost two years now, but it’s the least I can do,” Paulsen said.
'Let's stop underestimating this virus': Doctors call for vaccine passports in Alberta
CTV News EdmontonStaff Saturday, September 4, 2021 Doctors push for vaccine passport in Alberta
NOW PLAYING Concern and disappointment are just two words being used to describe the province’s plan to fight surging cases. Amanda Anderson reports.
EDMONTON -- Some doctors are disappointed with Alberta’s government for not introducing vaccine passports, which they say would be a better tool to fight the fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We had hope and then we entered a dark phase where all of a sudden we lost our leadership,” said Dr. Darren Markland, an ICU physician.
On Friday, Alberta announced financial incentives in the form of $100 gift cards for unvaccinated people if they get vaccinated. This is in addition to the Open for Summer Lottery, which recently drew for its second $1-million prize.
“It does not work,” said Markland. “The people who’ve decided not to get vaccine won’t until they literally get skin in the game and that skin is to participate in their previous lives, which everybody wants, so no, a hundred bucks isn’t going to do it.”
On Friday, Health Minister Tyler Shandro said that financial incentives have been used successfully in the U.S. An infectious disease physician called the evidence around such incentives “mixed.”
“New York City offered $100 incentives and that wasn’t sufficient and they’ve fundamentally needed to institute vaccine passports,” said Dr. Leyla Asadi. “Let’s stop underestimating this virus, please, please, now, finally… and do what we need and get through this.
“We don’t want to be shutting down businesses, businesses have been through enough and it fundamentally seems unfair to have to keep doing that when we could say, ‘Okay, if you are at high risk of becoming infected or spreading the virus we don’t want you in these places where you could be a super spreader.’”
The premier has stated that vaccine passports will not be implemented in Alberta.
“We really need to move to this model where we’re not punishing everybody, where we acknowledge that we need to take measures to reduce the number of cases, we acknowledge that there’s potential for strain on the health care system but we want to take steps that are not as drastic as what we had previously,” said Asadi.
With COVID-19 cases in the province rising, Alberta Health Services is postponing non-urgent surgeries in all five health zones.
“A scheduled surgery is not a minor thing, someone might have waited 12 months or longer to get their hip fixed because they can’t walk without pain,” said Dr. Paul Parks, Alberta Medical Association Emergency Medicine Section president. “The choices people, Albertans, are making right now to not get vaccinated are impacting other people.”
According to AHS CEO Dr. Verna Yiu, intensive care units across the province were sitting at 95 per cent full as of Friday.
“One of the things people forget… is that we need those ICU beds for non-COVID patients too,” said Parks.
With schools back in session, Asadi said that it is only a matter of time before community transmission rates increase.
“I would’ve liked to see the province say, ‘Okay, in schools we want to invest in better ventilation, filtration with portable HEPA filters, I would’ve liked to see them encourage masking in schools,” said Asadi.
“To pretend that transmission somehow doesn’t happen in schools, I don’t think that that’s founded in the science, I don’t think that that’s a reasonable stance anymore.”
Katy Ingraham, owner of Fleisch bar and delicatessen in Edmonton, says she attempted to obtain an exemption that would allow her establishment to serve liquor past 10 p.m. because it already requires proof of vaccination from patrons dining indoors, but she was told it was outside of jurisdiction. She's questioning why multiple rodeos were granted exemptions this weekend. (Andy Grabia)
At least four rodeos throughout Alberta say the government has granted them exemptions to the public health rule that states alcohol service must end at 10 p.m. — a move that has frustrated bar owners and event organizers subject to the new restriction.
On Friday, the Alberta government announced that restaurants, cafés, bars, pubs and nightclubs, as well as events, will be required to end alcohol service at 10 p.m. in order to slow transmission of COVID-19. Cases have been growing exponentially in Alberta, driven by the more infectious delta variant.
The Airdrie Pro Rodeo, Benalto Fair and Stampede, Daines Ranch Pro Rodeo and Ponoka Stampede all posted on social media this weekend that they are considered "outdoor special events" by Alberta Health Services and that liquor sales will continue until 2 a.m. local time.
While the Airdrie rodeo suggested patrons bring masks for bar service and said social distancing will apply inside facilities, both the Daines Rodeo and Ponoka Stampede posted that masks will not be required. The events feature either indoor saloons or dance halls. Masks are currently mandatory in all indoor public spaces in the province.
Other events in the province have been rescheduled or changed venues due to the new rules, including some dance parties and drag shows scheduled for Calgary Pride week.
CBC News contacted Alberta Health on Saturday to ask why some rodeos were granted exemptions and not other venues or events — at the time, Calgary Pride said no indoor or outdoor events associated with the festival had been granted exemptions.
On Sunday, Alberta Health responded to say that it had granted exemptions to the Ponoka, Airdrie and Cochrane rodeos — and that it had now granted exemptions to venues hosting Calgary Pride events. It did not say the Daines and Benalto events were granted exemptions, despite posts by those organizations on social media.
Hot Mess, which has hosted LGBTQ+ dance parties in Calgary for nearly a decade, said it received a last-minute exemption late Saturday night, hours after CBC News had asked Alberta Health why it had granted exemptions to some events and not others.
Jordan Sorrenti preps a sandwich at Paddy's Barbecue and Brewery in Calgary. He says he'd rather see the province implement a vaccine passport for bars than a liquor curfew, which he says penalizes the unvaccinated and vaccinated alike. (Terri Trembath/CBC)
Alberta Health said it's not a new decision to grant exemptions from public health rules to select once-a-year events and that those exemptions are granted "due to the event's importance to the local economy and community."
A spokesperson said that the current exemptions apply only to open-air events and that mask requirements continue to apply indoors.
Sean Thomas Stewart, co-founder of Hot Mess, said they had scrambled to move Sunday's event to a new outdoor venue and an hours-earlier start after the new rules were announced.
"Without having any insight into how and why the province made that call for some events and not for others, it's hard not to take it personally," Stewart said before the exemption was granted.
"I, and I think the rest of the LGBTQ+ community in Calgary, would be very eager to have the province take a second look at what they are making exceptions for."
Elliot Rae Cormier, Calgary Pride's development manager, had questioned on Saturday afternoon what led to the province's decision to immediately grant exemptions to rodeo events. Cormier confirmed Pride's exemption came in after 10 p.m. on Saturday.
"I'm just really curious what factors led to that decision," Cormier said. "I am concerned for smaller businesses, smaller venues and local artists … who are now having to shift. There has been a lot of financial uncertainty."
We've done absolutely everything in our power to make our space as safe as possible, and we're still going to be penalized … it's a helpless and demoralizing feeling.- Katy Ingraham, owner of Fleish in Edmonton.
Katy Ingraham, owner of Fleisch bar and delicatessen in Edmonton and co-founder of the Edmonton Independent Hospitality Community, says her establishment has taken a cautious approach throughout the pandemic by requiring masking. It didn't reopen indoor dining before putting a mandatory vaccination policy in place.
She spent the entire day on Friday on the phone with various provincial health officials and departments, as well as her legislative member, attempting to obtain an exemption to the liquor curfew based on the bar's vaccine requirement. As of Sunday, she still hadn't received a response.
"My thought was that it would also set a precedent that if we were able to get that exemption, more businesses might follow suit and implement vaccine policies," Ingraham said.
But she was told, over and over, that it was outside of AHS's jurisdiction to grant exemptions.
Ingraham said she was furious when she saw rodeos were able to obtain an exemption from AHS after she was stonewalled.
The bar portion of the establishment opened just three weeks ago and was set to serve alcohol until 1 a.m. each night — now they'll have to cut back on staff.
"We've done absolutely everything in our power to make our space as safe as possible, and we're still going to be penalized for that while events like this can go on and receive exemptions? It's a helpless and demoralizing feeling," she said.
Jordan Sorrenti, owner of Paddy's Barbecue and Brewery in Calgary, said he'd like to see the province require vaccination to dine indoors at restaurants or bars rather than shut them down early.
"What they're doing by closing the bars down at 10 o'clock is they're picking on the young crowd, who they understand are the under-vaccinated, but they're penalizing all of the restaurants for it which is just not fair," he said, noting sales go down as case numbers climb.
"I'm kind of upset, because all of the staff that we worked so hard to bring back are going to get laid off again."
Premier Jason Kenney said Friday that he recognizes the new measures will be disruptive to the hospitality industry, but said they were necessary to protect the health-care system.
With files from Terri Trembath
Saskatchewan·History
Whither the bison: What happened to the Prairies' once-mighty herds?
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How could so many bison disappear in a few decades?
Bison bones are loaded into a Canadian Pacific Railway boxcar. (Library and Archives Canada - PA066544)
Historian Bill Waiser's many books include In Search of Almighty Voice: Resistance and Reconciliation (2020).
They are some of the most arresting photographs from Saskatchewan's past: Tens of thousands of dried, bleached bison bones, stacked like cordwood along rail lines, waiting to be loaded into boxcars.
The bones serve as testimony to the near-extinction of the bison, with the popular story being that the animals were wantonly slaughtered by white hunters, madly firing their guns from passing trains.
That story, though, is an American one, simply applied to Canada.
It never happened north of the border because the bison herds were effectively gone from the Saskatchewan territory by 1879. The Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) was not built across the Canadian Prairies until 1881 and completed four years later.
The first CPR passenger train did not reach Pile of Bones — later renamed Regina in honour of Queen Victoria — until August 1883.
If passengers on that first train were shooting at anything, it was more likely gophers.
It has been estimated that the northern plains of the western interior likely supported from five to six million bison in the early 19th century. By the 1860s two-thirds were gone. (Bill Waiser)
What happened to the bison?
It has been estimated that the northern plains of the western interior likely supported from five to six million bison in the early 19th century. By the 1860s, though, two-thirds of the animals were gone.
As Methodist missionary George McDougall gloomily summed up the situation along the upper North Saskatchewan River: "A time of starvation. No buffalo."
Where did the bison go? How could so many disappear in a few decades?
Bison were once the mainstay of subsistence lifestyle for the First Nations on the northern Prairies. And their demise had a direct bearing on the history of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations in Western Canada in the latter half of the 19th century.
Bison decline
The largest consumer of bison meat was the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC). The dozens of company posts across the Canadian northwest, along with the incoming and outgoing canoe brigades, ran on pemmican–dried, pounded bison meat, mixed with fat and sometimes berries. Pemmican not only packed a caloric punch, it could be stored for years.
The Canadian grasslands served as a kind of pantry for HBC operations. Here, hundreds of thousands of pounds of bison meat were processed annually for the trade. Canadian historian George Colpitts has even suggested in his book, Pemmican Empire, that HBC provisioning posts were more like abattoirs.
First Nations bands supplied bison meat to the HBC by working their bison pounds intensively or hunting the herds from horseback. The Métis were also vitally involved. Families from Red River travelled out onto the plains every summer in large cart caravans. Once they located the herds, their hunts were a marvel of co-ordination and skill.
This William Perehudoff piece illistrates hunting bison from horseback in the mid-19th century. (Saskatchewan Archives Board/S-MN-B 3118)
These hunting pressures eventually took a toll on the bison. Herds began to contract southwestward, while the overall number of animals began a steep decline.
The Cree responded to this crisis by travelling southward to the Cypress Hills region and present-day northern Montana, and the Poplar and Milk Rivers, where they often clashed with the Blackfoot over the dwindling bison herds. The Métis also began to winter inland to be closer to the herds.
At its northern posts, the HBC even tried making pemmican from caribou.
By the time the region became part of the Dominion of Canada in 1870, hunger stalked the northern plains.
After a visit to the region during the 1873 field season, Dr. Alfred R.C. Selwyn, director of the Geological Survey of Canada, reported: "The discontent and uneasiness at present, prevailing amongst the Indians, [is] almost entirely a question of the future supply of food … the extermination of the buffalo means starvation and death."
Bison an issue at treaty
During the Treaty Six negotiations in 1876, First Nation leaders talked about possible famine and the need for government support as they made the transition from hunting to farming. They also wanted something done about the shrinking bison herds.
When Treaty Commissioner Alexander Morris met with the Willow Cree near Duck Lake in late August 1876, much of the discussion dealt with the disappearance of the bison.
"I am alarmed when I look at the buffalo," one councillor told Morris. "It appears to me as if there is only one."
Chief Beardy was equally anxious about the bison and suggested that special steps be taken to preserve and manage the remaining animals.
"I do not want very much more than what has been promised, only a little thing," Beardy pleaded. "On account of the buffalo, I am getting anxious."
Bison numbers were in steep decline by the 1860s. (Adrian Paton)
Senior Cree Chief Sweetgrass also raised concerns about the disappearing bison at the Treaty Six meeting at Fort Pitt in early September 1876. Sweetgrass had first raised the alarm in April 1871, telling the lieutenant governor for the Northwest Territories: "Our country is no longer able to support us." Five years later, he was still waiting for action.
Ultimately, Treaty Six did not contain any specific provisions regarding bison protection; there was only Morris's word during the deliberations that government action would be forthcoming.
The 1877 bison protection ordinance
On March 22, 1877, at the end of the first — and only — meeting of the North-West Territories Council at Fort Livingstone, near present-day Pelly, Sask., Lt.-Gov. David Laird proclaimed 10 ordinances, including No. 5: "An Ordinance for the Protection of the Buffalo."
The bison protection ordinance contained regulations about what animals could be hunted (especially around females and calves), how they were to be hunted (such as pounds and jumps) and when they could be hunted (including closed seasons). Any person "in circumstance of personal necessity" could also kill any bison at any time for "immediate wants." The ordinance also dealt with the reporting and prosecution of anyone in violation of the regulations.
LISTEN | Historian Bill Waiser shares bison history
Saskatchewan Weekend11:30What happened to the prairie bison? A historian explains.
How did the bison disappear from Saskatchewan? It might not be the story you think it is. Historian Bill Waiser gives host Shauna Powers insight into what really happened and how that shaped relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in the years that followed. 11:30
From the beginning, there was uncertainty around whether the regulations could be effectively enforced. It was never clear how the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) were going to incorporate the monitoring of the bison herds into their many other duties. All the Mounties could really do was depend on informants — and only after animals had been killed.
There was also opposition to the regulations. The Métis, who lived by the hunt, saw it as an attack on their livelihood. First Nations were equally alarmed. They had asked that the bison be protected for their benefit — not that their own hunting activities be controlled.
The new rules were a classic example of newcomers thinking they knew what was best. First Nations leaders were not consulted during the framing of the bison protection ordinance.
Ironically, it was the fugitive Sitting Bull who asked cryptically in response to the new law: "When did the Almighty give the Canadian government the right to keep the Indians from killing the buffalo?"
He might also have asked, given the starving condition of his band at the time: What buffalo?
Starvation summer of 1879
The bison protection ordinance made little difference to the fate of the bison. Except for a few small herds that occasionally wandered north into Canadian territory, they were essentially gone from the northern plains by 1879.
Many in the West believed that the bison would be lost one day, but it was supposed to be years away. Assistant NWMP Commissioner James Macleod was personally shocked by how suddenly it happened. So too was the new Indian Commissioner Edgar Dewdney, who claimed in his first annual report that the "disappearance of the buffalo had taken the Government as much by surprise as the Indians."
It was quite an understatement. Dewdney toured the northwest during the summer of 1879, and, according to his diary, was forever encountering First Nations groups anxious about how they were going to survive the coming winter.
Indian Commissioner Edgar Dewdney pursued a 'sheer compulsion' policy. (Saskatchewan Archives Board/G.F. Shepherd Fonds)
Henriette Forget, the wife of Amédée-Emmanuel Forget, clerk for the North-West Territories Council (and Saskatchewan's first lieutenant-governor), also kept a record of how the disappearance of the bison was playing out at the new territorial capital at Battleford.
"Rumours of starvation, from different parts of the country," Henriette wrote in late April 1879. "The buffalo having disappeared rendered the condition of the Indians most deplorable, what a question to solve."
Dewdney knew the answer. Even though he was not responsible for the disappearance of the bison, Dewdney deliberately used the crisis for his own purposes. He called his policy, "sheer compulsion."
Dewdney withheld rations from First Nation bands who had refused to take treaty or had left their reserves. This hard-hearted policy starved Big Bear and his followers into submission, and after holding out for six years, the chief reluctantly entered treaty at Fort Walsh in December 1882.
Dewdney also insisted that if treaty bands wanted provisions, then they had to take up their reserves. And once on their reserves, if bands wanted to be fed, then they had to work for rations. Dewdney was prepared to do whatever was necessary to gain the upper hand over First Nation bands, regardless of the treaty agreements.
Bison bone market
By the late 19th century, bison bones were in great demand for the fertilizer industry. There was no shortage of American buyers. The North-West Fertilizing Company, of Chicago, for example, offered $19 per ton in the fall of 1888 — a price that Wisconsin's Janesville Carbon Chemical Works gladly matched.
Supplying bison bones to fertilizer manufacturers was relatively easy money. Millions of skeletal remains littered the Prairie landscape. They had accumulated over hundreds of years. It was a simple matter of collecting and stockpiling the bones at railway sidings along the railway and then loading them in boxcars.
There was a certain irony to the business. The bones of the once-great bison herds — herds that had fed people for generations — were being cleared away for a new agricultural industry that was to turn the Western Interior into Canada's breadbasket.
Breaking the Prairie sod. (University of Saskatchewan Archives and Special Collections/R. Wall Fonds/MG284)
The House Natural Resources Committee has released a budget proposal that would end a slew of harmful handouts to the fossil fuel industry, protect publicly owned resources, and raise significant new revenues for U.S. taxpayers. This is a fiscally responsible approach to resource development after a century of waste and mismanagement.
Oil well on public land in New Mexico. Image courtesy of Bureau of Land Management
For over a century, the federal government has practically given public lands away to oil and gas companies by auctioning them off for small sums. With bids beginning as low as $2/acre and rents starting at just $1.50/year, fossil fuel producers have been able to control millions of acres of public land, even without using them to produce oil and gas. Meanwhile, industry has been let off the hook when it leaks methane or allows it to be vented and flared. This happens without repercussions or costs to companies at fault, despite the value of methane as a resource and its extraordinary harm as a climate pollutant, not to mention the health impacts for those who live in the wake of these industrial operations. Complex wells that cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to cap after they run dry are operated without any assurance—legal or fiscal—that the driller will cap them instead of walking away. Each of these practices, and many more, amount to billions of dollars in hidden subsidies that the oil and gas industry enjoys to produce the very fuels that are driving climate change and causing incalculable damage to the nation’s ecosystems and communities every year.
Now, the House Natural Resources Committee is staring down these irresponsible practices with a suite of fiscal reforms that will transform the federal oil and gas program and make it work to the benefit of taxpayers, instead of fossil fuel CEOs.
Here’s a look at some of the big changes the Committee is proposing:
Higher royalty rates charged on resources produced from federal leases. The new royalty rate more closely harmonizes the federal rate with the rates charged by major oil and gas producing states, would raise billions of dollars of new revenues, and would ensure a more fair return for taxpayer-owned resources.
Increased minimum bids and rental rates on federal leases, shorter lease terms, and an end to non-competitive leasing. These changes will discourage the rampant practice of speculative leasing and help to ensure that companies only nominate and bid on parcels that they truly intend to develop within a reasonable timeframe.
Increased bonding rates and mechanisms for ensuring bond amounts are adequate to cover the costs of capping and remediating idled wells. This increased cost of doing business will help confront the growing problem of orphaned and abandoned wells and ensure that taxpayers are not left on the hook to clean up the industry’s polluting legacy. Required royalties on all produced methane, including leaked and flared methane. This fee will ensure that taxpayers are compensated for all resources extracted from federal public lands, limit waste, and encourage drillers to identify and remediate the methane leaks that are currently leading to a massive spike in dangerous emissions of this climate super pollutant.
Other proposals include fees to support conservation efforts, discourage speculation, and help resource managers inspect oil and gas operations on public lands. Another key change includes closing sensitive landscapes and areas with little chance of ever being developed like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and offshore areas in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Eastern Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas development. This would save precious government resources and allow these areas to be managed in ways that will protect their value to the public and critical ecosystems instead of subjecting them to the harms of fossil fuel development.
This plan puts taxpayers before polluters. For over a century the oil and gas industry has been able to write the rules for how they are managed. The federal fossil fuel leasing system is broken, and the number of reforms in this single package from House Natural Resources shows just how out of hand the situation has gotten. These common sense proposals rebalance the scales. They’ll allow our land managers to make our public lands and waters work for people, the climate, and the countless species that depend on them for survival.
'MAYBE' TECH
Carbon Capture Gets Cheaper: Making Methane From CO2
ByPACIFIC NORTHWEST NATIONAL LABORATORYSEPTEMBER 5, 2021
Just as important as understanding how best to capture CO2 is understanding how to use it. A new study details how CO2 can be converted into methane, the primary component of synthetic natural gas. Here, Jotheeswari Kothandaraman, PNNL chemist and author of the new study, holds a sample of methanol, which has an even greater number of applications than methane. Credit: Photo by Andrea Starr | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Methane made from CO2 and renewable hydrogen offers a new path toward cheaper carbon capture.
In their ongoing effort to make carbon capture more affordable, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have developed a method to convert captured carbon dioxide (CO2) into methane, the primary component of natural gas.
By streamlining a longstanding process in which CO2 is converted to methane, the researchers’ new method reduces the materials needed to run the reaction, the energy needed to fuel it and, ultimately, the selling price of the gas.
A key chemical player known as EEMPA makes the process possible. EEMPA is a PNNL-developed solvent that snatches CO2 from power plant flue gas, binding the greenhouse gas so it can be converted into useful chemicals.
Earlier this year, PNNL researchers revealed that using EEMPA in power plants could slash the price of carbon capture to 19 percent lower than standard industry costs—the lowest documented price of carbon capture. Now, in a study published on August 21, 2021, in the journal ChemSusChem, the team reveals a new incentive—in cheaper natural gas—to further drive down costs.
When compared to the conventional method of methane conversion, the new process requires an initial investment that costs 32 percent less. Operation and maintenance costs are 35 percent cheaper, bringing the selling price of synthetic natural gas down by 12 percent.
Methane’s role in carbon capture
Different methods for converting CO2 into methane have long been known. However, most processes rely on high temperatures and are often too expensive for widespread commercial use.
In addition to geologic production, methane can be produced from renewable or recycled CO2 sources, and can be used as fuel itself or as an H2 energy carrier. Though it is a greenhouse gas and requires careful supply chain management, methane has many applications, ranging from household use to industrial processes, said lead author and PNNL chemist Jotheeswari Kothandaraman.
“Right now a large fraction of the natural gas used in the U.S. has to be pumped out of the ground,” said Kothandaraman, “and demand is expected to increase over time, even under climate change mitigation pathways. The methane produced by this process—made using waste CO2 and renewably sourced hydrogen—could offer an alternative for utilities and consumers looking for natural gas with a renewable component and a lower carbon footprint.”
Calculating costs and capturing carbon
To explore the use of EEMPA in converting CO2 to methane, Kothandaraman and her fellow authors studied the reaction’s molecular underpinnings, then assessed the cost of running the process at scale in a 550-megawatt power plant.
Conventionally, plant operators can capture CO2 by using special solvents that douse flue gas before it’s emitted from plant chimneys. But these traditional solvents have relatively high water content, making methane conversion difficult.
Using EEMPA instead reduces the energy needed to fuel such a reaction. The savings stem partly from EEMPA’s ability to make CO2 dissolve more easily, which means less pressure is needed to run the conversion.
The authors’ assessment identified further cost savings, in that CO2 captured by EEMPA can be converted to methane on site. Traditionally, CO2 is stripped from water-rich solvents and sent off site to be converted or stored underground. Under the new method, captured CO2 can be mixed with renewable hydrogen and a catalyst in a simple chamber, then heated to half the pressure used in conventional methods to make methane.
The reaction is efficient, the authors said, converting over 90 percent of captured CO2 to methane, though the ultimate greenhouse gas footprint depends on what the methane is used to do. And EEMPA captures over 95 percent of CO2 emitted in flue gas. The new process gives off excess heat, too, providing steam for power generation.
Making more from CO2
The chemical process highlighted in the paper represents one path among many, said Kothandaraman, where captured CO2 can be used as a feedstock to produce other valuable chemicals.
PNNL researchers are developing technologies to capture CO2 from industrial emissions and from the atmosphere. Here, manager of the Carbon Management and Fossil Energy Market Sector, Casie Davidson, explains CO2 mitigation technologies and how they might deploy at scale. Credit: Presentation by Casie Davidson | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
“I’ll be glad when I can make this process work for methanol as efficiently as it does for methane now,” she said. “That’s my long-term goal.” Methanol has many more applications than methane, said Kothandaraman, who has sought to uncover the catalytic reactions that could produce methanol from CO2 for roughly a decade. Creating plastics from captured CO2 is another route the team plans to explore.
“It’s important that we not only capture CO2, but find valuable ways to use it,” said Ron Kent, Advanced Technologies Development Manager at SoCalGas, “and this study offers a cost-effective pathway toward making something valuable out of waste CO2.”
Reference: “Integrated Capture and Conversion of CO2 Using a Water-lean, Post-Combustion CO2 Capture Solvent” by David Heldebrant, Jotheeswari Kothandaraman, Johnny Saavedra Lopez, Yuan Jiang, Eric D. Walter, Sarah D. Burton and Robert A. Dagle, 21 August 2021, ChemSusChem. DOI: 10.1002/cssc.202101590
This study was supported by SoCalGas and the Department of Energy’s Technology Commercialization Fund and Office of Science.
In addition to Kothandaraman, authors include PNNL scientists Johnny Saavedra Lopez, Yuan Jiang, Eric D. Walter, Sarah D. Burton, Robert A. Dagle and David J. Heldebrant, who holds a joint appointment at Washington State University.
