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hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and Engineers come together to chat about a common interest to share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity I'm Laura and I'm joined by Jasmin and Antonia to talk about where the carbon captures being used in industry right now and debate whether the captured CO2 should be used or stored and we're actually joined by a special audience of students from the engineering development trusts roots to stem course who will be asking us
questions via a chat function so we'll try and answer those throughout the episode. Now we've talked about various aspects of carbon dioxide in several episodes over the years because we've talked about whether it's a good idea to burn trees which capture carbon and why we're so slow at developing ways of capturing it and making human-made technology and we've also talked about a cool new startup that's using some of this tech to make fuels using electricity so this time we're focusing
on Industrial applications. Jasmin I know this is part of your area of expertise so what fascinates you about it carbon capture is actually something that's been used by Industries since the 90s so the oil and gas insect has been using carbon capture and storage since the 90s firstly in Norway of the things that I find interesting interesting about it is that for decarbonizing for certain sectors it's they need carbon capture and storage if they want to meet any kind of Net Zero targets just
because like sort of some stuff like cement the CO2 is not actually mostly from any fossil fuel bird it's actually from when the Limestone breaks down and releases a lot of CO2 so for cement and some other things there's no way of decarbonizing it without carbon capture so I didn't know that there had been industrial uses of carbon capture since the 90s so I did my PhD in one very small aspect of this in uh sort of 2010 2013 and it was still very much a technology that was being developed for
a whole range of different applications recognizing there was a need to stop sending it into the atmosphere I think because the sort of the use in Norway is slightly different so in Norway they really really push a carbon capture because the Norwegian government introduced a carbon tax so the CO2 that was being captured was actually CO2 that was in the natural gas that was being produced it had a higher CO2 content than what was allowed so they had to separate it out otherwise they're going
to be very heavily penalized by the Norwegian government it sounds kind of funny that it has to be a legal incentive to do it it can't just be this moral altruistic goal yeah Antonia you've got an interest in this as well but slightly different background and this follows on from an episode almost two years ago there was a CO2 shortage we were talking about like why aren't we capturing more of it from the air and using it to do things I started hearing about calm capture storage during my
undergrad as a chemical engineering student there's that interest from a climate change perspective but also something that talked about in chemical engineering and when you're designing say a chemical plant you want to make a certain product but as a result you might end up with waste products or by products naturally you'd have to get rid of them and treat them somehow for example that case of the natural gas we having to extract the CO2 you could either just throw away the CO2 but the
Norwegian government had restrictions on that or you can try and sell it on makes them useful out of it and what people are saying is even if we had say like biomass carbon capture storage is it just that we store the carbon or is there a use for carbon so I'd been reading about is actually carbon dioxide has a lot of uses which we discussed in that episode two years ago in the food industry especially there are other things such as making it into other more complex chemicals so there's a lot of
things that I think have an Avenue for Innovation and making better use of what we already have yeah and one of the things we were saying in that episode was that although we can capture it it's actually quite energy intensive to do so so it's far more economic to use it from it's like a byproduct from other processes where it sort of separated out anyway it's just a better way of doing it seems a bit of a shame in a way so I like that you're saying that there needs
to be some change there needs to be some Innovation to get people to do more with it you know there's a lot of chemistry that you can create so there are lots of different chemicals that can be built off CO2 and it's about you know bringing up from Lab scale to to real scales like you know on a manufacturing level where you can actually have enough to make it a viable supply chain for some for another business so you know there's a lot of steps even after you've
discovered that you can use CO2 for that reason you've got to build everything else and I think we're still quite early on in that stage yeah and some questions coming in from the audience as well so one is why aren't more countries working in a similar way to Norway trying to send incentivize Industries to not admit as much CO2 does either one of you have any thoughts about why or our place is doing it in a similar way to Norway and we're just not hearing about it as much
Norway was a very interesting one because they were imposing a carbon tax in the 90s there are other countries who are imposing carbon taxes and obviously there is like the current emissions trading scheme that it's basically like a carbon tax but like the main thing is just like the the price of the carbon has to be high enough that it incentivizes companies to want to do more to actually go about reducing their emissions because if it's not high enough then the cost of
emitting just ends up being cheaper than than the cost of actually like doing stuff to actually reduce how much they're emitting into the atmosphere so that's one of the main things in terms of like why there's not as many countries doing little company companies doing it there is increasing interest and like just like political will in terms of encouraging carbon capture because it's just been generally acknowledged that um we're just too far into the climate change
um which we're too far into global warming climate change to like not have common capture so we just really need to accelerate the rate that is being used because it is being used under social skill but currently only to very large emitting facilities so like the refinery cement plants and some thermal power plants but it's mostly just to do with you need to make it a case where that sort of business is will find it like economically viable to want to decarbonize rather than to actually just
pay attacks or a penalty for emitting CO2 in the officer and I guess the next question from the audience also kind of falls on from that is about what could be done to make people more environmentally aware and I I think it sounds like you're saying at least for companies there's just no Financial incentive to do things differently and at the end of the day it's all about making money sadly um I I think there can be a lot of um consumer pressure though to make change yeah
yeah I would agree Like You could argue like the like companies who do admit and who do like but use fossil fuels and emit CO2 and other greenhouse gas and natural that they do have some kind of like moral reasoning or grounds to go about abating or reducing their greenhouse gas emissions but at the same time their companies only have a bottom line so if they go bursts then they go burst and another company will just like then there'll just be like another company who like May will like see that
and just be like okay they made that mistake of having a very bad business plan so we're just not going to do what they did so yeah it's quite complicated because you need to like make it worth maybe you need to like make it so that businesses can actually still grow and survive even if they are having to like pay extra extra for all the additional Technologies and changes needed to their facilities so that they can decarbonize I feel like this is touching on a lot of
what we discussed in our episode about sustainability Antonia yeah we talked more about sustainable development and from my experience as a consultant to businesses trying to cut their greenhouse gas emissions it's it's really difficult because if you don't have Unity you could lose Tay to a to your competitor as Jasmine said but it's also even if all of the UK agreed let's put on a calm attacks which we actually have got in place it's just very small um it still impacts us because we
already have like high wages and higher health and safety standards than say other countries so they're say cost per unit of whatever product is going to be lower than another country and so if you're you know if you're just choosing the cheapest product you it might end up that we've taxed people in the UK too much that they lose to International competition and then it starts becoming about economics even though we're talking about climate change which is uh
scientifically proven to happening and we see the effects in Europe right now with like heat waves and forest fires you know a lot closer to home July has been the hottest month in recorded history so climate change is real yeah but clearly not in the UK where it's been raining well if it's been raining more than average though yeah climate not weather yeah another episode we've had about weather predictions and not being the same as climate yeah and getting a bit more difficult to predict
because of the changing parameters I think we should probably move back on just talking about carbon catch it though yeah Jasmine you mentioned there are lots of ways to capture carbon it's another reason why carbon capture in general isn't widely used is because there's just lots of different ways you can capture carbon I'm going to talk specifically about capturing carbon from combustion gases or flu gases so in general there are three different ways of capturing it you can capture it post
combustion so you separate out the CO2 from the actual flue gas and there's also pre-combustion oxy combustion where you make it so that when you burn your fossil fuel you end up with a pure stream of CO2 rather than a mixture of CO2 and other gases currently the most widely used one is the post combustion just because it's easier and it's the most mature technology one that we could potentially see more in the future which could have potentially really good
applications for more of smaller scale Industries called chemical looping what you do is you use Metals basically to separate out the oxygen from your in-going air so you end up with a pure oxygen that ends up reacting with your fuel in the combustion process because there's no other gases present you end up with a pure stream of CO2 and what's interesting about chemical looping is that it's circular so that you have your reaction of your metal so things like
iron or manganese your metal reacts with the air to separate out the oxygen so that bonds with the metal in the oxidation process and then your oxidized metal then gets sent into the chamber where you're going to be burning your fossil fuels and because you only have the oxygen present you end up with a pure stream of carbon dioxide during that reaction the metal then becomes free and then that gets looped back into the first reaction it's still in very early stages of development but it has a
lot a lot of potential for being used on the variety of different scales so not just like really big scale but also on the smaller scale and based on what's going on in terms of the research it looks like it's one that could be very easy to retrofit because that's going to be a really big factor in how industry and companies will develop and incorporate carbon capture into their processes because you want something that doesn't dramatically change your facility so it could be one that we see
a lot more being used in industry for me the the question then is if there are other technologies that are more difficult to retrofit what are they and what's the difference what makes them more challenging or is that a really difficult question to answer no it's not the main thing is to do with scale of how much CO2 you need removing chemical looping is dressy one because you basically just need two reaction Chambers awarus for some others you need things like multiple heat exchangers
multiple reaction Chambers multiple like separation columns for example in the most commonly used method of carbon capture which is post-combustion Amy scrubbing you separate out the CO2 from the combustion gas using a liquid amine but you then need to separate the CO2 from that liquidamine so it has to go through a series of different like Heating and Cooling processes so you actually end up with like lots of different equipment that you need to add onto your facility which can be tricky
if you're quite Limited in the space that you have available um so that's why it's mostly being used by the larger facilities because they generally have more space or they're in the middle of nowhere but for things like a small Refinery or a smallish trying to think of other things I admit CO2 that are smaller than the cement plant Antonio what's smaller than a cement plan but also a mix CO2 beer making places bread making devices yes I was gonna say a very very large
fermentation plant yeah fermentation plant yeah like they could also use chemical looping as well the biggest challenge I found is is it's making a change on site which isn't insignificant and if you're doing something else that your main thing is or you're the only reason why you're missing CO2 is because you combust a lot of fuel um you might not necessarily have the expertise to run a amine scrubbing plan and so it it's that extra difficulty um to someone who might just I don't
know be like a paper mill or something oh okay yeah that is true when I've we've talked about this before I've always thought about it in the context of these like big chemical plants but my my PhD was on membranes that could be used in post combustion as you said Jasmine and you had all those different gases in there that would compete with absorbing into the same membrane or filtering through the membrane so that's what I tend to think of I don't have to think about those other smaller less I
guess technical plants or technical in that way well imagine all those micro breweries with all the craft beer there are they're only as big as like a garage or like the archway under underneath some rail in Manchester you know they're they're not gonna they're not gonna get a whole a whole nother chemical plant basically extremely you're a connoisseur of craft beers Antonio do you go around sampling them all all the microbrews in Manchester not yet but could be a bit of
fun just go in and be like hey have you considered trying to capture your CO2 and they'll probably go no then you can tell them about chemical looping or you can introduce in the concept of using a membrane because a member is another technology that you could use but it's just like very very low in terms of Technology Readiness level so no one's really looking into it you just need the right size filter isn't it it's like a sieve yeah yeah I was gonna say it's 10 years ago my PhD
was on a membranes and it sounds like they've not really moved on since then no they've really not basically what happened was they were like yeah Amy scrubbing works great we'll go with this yeah there you go one winning technology and that's it all the others can just uh disappear for these smaller but I guess quite significant Industries Antonio I don't know if you happen to have any stats from your consultancy on the smaller producers that are significant
because we hear about Steels and cements and energy quite a lot well that's the really interesting thing so like you know Jasmine mentioned the emissions trading scheme and the threshold for those is a lot bigger than what you'd think I don't know many companies and that's because of the sort of sign days of companies that I work with but you know I can imagine a little housing estate they're kind of that big they still emit a significant amount of carbon dioxide but wouldn't fall under
like emissions trading schemes so in a sense the only way to incentivize them to capture CO2 would be a technology that is easy enough for them to use cost effective because you know they're not falling under those kind of carbon penalties or there is more um sort of environmental pressure which I have to say there is with with you know other companies committing to to certain targets of carbon emissions it means that everyone they're working with also has to commit to those otherwise
you there's no point saying oh yeah well I do very little but the thing that I purchase that has high carbon emissions so you know I don't want everyone to come away from this talk that we don't do a lot there is a lot more we can be doing but there is something that is happening as well um but yeah in terms of terms of size um I want to say like you know it's all the other sectors they still make the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions um it's it's not just steel and cement
but they're the most concentrated places where you can capture CO2 whereas everything else is just anything that burns fuel yeah pretty much yeah and I guess that's part of the government incentive to switch to electric cars rather than ones that run on petrol and Diesel I'm still not 100 convinced by electric cars to be honest so that's a different episode again well by 2030 you won't be able to buy a new diesel or petrol car not a new one I know I've never bought a new car though
I've always bought a second-hand I haven't driven a car in 10 years so well to tackle global warming from refrigerants they phase out selling new refrigerant but this is different obviously a car is made up of multiple parts so you just need to still be able to find all those parts the car which might stick around for a bit longer I mean people still make vintage cars work so you just be like living on eBay just like right or maybe you'll 3D print it yeah maybe how do you like my vintage
stuff and using things secondhand as well that is a way of reducing your carbon footprint I'm just using things for longer yeah yeah that's true I'm getting distracted from the carbon capture questions again yes because you you can't fly a carbon capture to combustion engine cars I guess you could but the energy penalty would probably be so high that then your car wouldn't go anywhere so all the energy be going into capturing the carbon so you're just creating a Perpetual carbon capture
machine yeah and also like how big is your car like what does your exhaust look like you tell me Jasmine you know the technology which is why 2D carbonize transport you kind of have to like look at biofuels electrical hydrogen because carbon capture just really doesn't work imagine like okay even though it's not a battery car it's a combustion car and then you have something that's attached on like a little wagon just be a train in which case we should just take the train
that's what I tend to do even though I don't live in the best place for it but I'd much prefer public transport and waiting for public transport revolutions and no one needs to own a private vehicle there's just something available that turns up when you need it and takes other people on that same journey I was driving on the most way and I thought what if this Motorway was on Rails you know how would that be helpful because because there's loads of people there's
some people who are like too slow and then there's some people who are trying to exceed the the speed limit so like if we were just on a on a rail there'd be none of that concern about is this person trying to overtake me are they going to crash into me about it so are you saying I I can't work out if you're saying that once you're on the tracks sudden it then takes over the speed that you're traveling as well so you have no control over the speed is that what
you're saying yeah yeah because that's not what it sounded like and it sounded like we were just all stuck behind this 30 mile an hour car oh God no no no no why would I want that anyway yeah anyway back to carving captions yes there is a question in the chat from the very sensible audience after being captured will the carbon be stored and how environmentally friendly is the storage system so that's a really good question so right now the majority will be stored is the main plan San
Antonio said earlier it can use it in making different products so like carbonated drinks is a really big market for using CO2 you can also use it as a fee stock to make certain chemicals so things like methanol and like other basic chemicals you can use CO2 to make them you have to change your manufacturing process you can also like use it in greenhouses to enhance productivity because photosynthesis but the majority of CO2 is planned to be stored in geological storage facilities
and as far as the science indicates it is perfectly safe there's been no cases as far as I'm aware they've detected CO2 that's been leaking from any of these facilities or from these pipelines but having said that a scale of carbon storage is still very small right now we're using depleted oil in gas fields to store the carbon so it's really important we check that everything's A-Okay and these different facilities as well as also in the pipelines other types of storage apart from in
geological facilities like in the ocean that's an idea that people have suggested I don't know if that is the right way I feel like we're sort of changing the carbon cycle the thing is the ocean is already a really big sink and when I say sink I mean method or place that removes carbon from the atmosphere so it's part of the carbon cycle right now the ocean is kind of at capacity in terms of absorbing carbon because we've been pumping it too much into the atmosphere when CO2 is in the
ocean it makes it more acidic but if you make it more Alkali then you increase the ocean's ability to absorb CO2 so there are like I wouldn't say there's plans but it's been suggested that you could have projects that's where you basically make the ocean more Alkali to make the make it better absorbing more CO2 but it's quite controversial because then you'll need to think about what impacts it would have to local Marine wildlife and habitats and also it's just
generally a controversial because we're already putting enough junk into the ocean so basically the only places to store it potentially the ocean that's a terrible idea or more likely underground but then if you can't use it then you really going to incentivize people to just create waste effectively when they could previously just pump it into the atmosphere and not have any cost with it I guess the other thing to do is to find something some use for it so I think in
the future there is going to be a growing market for using carbon because there's this concept called the circular carbon economy so using carbon that's been captured from different industrial processes but right now natural gas is a really big feedstock used in making a lot of basic chemicals like ammonia and methanol as we move away from fossil fuel based raw materials there will be a growing market for like okay how do we still produce all the ammonia that we
need to make all the fertilizer that we need to make food if we're not using natural gas the main alternative way would be to use hydrogen and then you'd also use nitrogen from the air so that would be a direct replacement for ammonia but for other things like the hydrocarbon based chemicals you still need a carbon sauce and CO2 is probably going to be the source that we use rather than other methods I see like this captured CO2 is replacing the fossil fuels that we've dug up to use as
our carbon sources you know and and the ones that we dig up they come in various chain lengths if people remember like crude oil distillation the smallest lamps are actually most useful because you can tailor exactly what chemical you want yeah CO2 some people calling it like a C1 Source because it's got one carbon atom and so then it's much more versatile enough seen some very complicated chemical Journal articles which say here are all the possible useful reactions it can do there are a
lot I think Jasmine didn't mention polymers oh yeah you can also make polymers from it in general knowing that you can have like methane or methanol you know we call it chemical building blocks and you can basically make a long chain of those yeah and you have plastic and some of these Plastics you know very useful well I think on another episode we talked about past tense everything is linked pretty much yes I feel like that answers are one of the questions from our audience about if it's not
beneficial to economically for companies to capture carbon then how could you make it more appealing the answer is find a use for it sell it to someone else you can make something yeah yeah also another reference to our e-fuel episode which is where some of those captured CO2 could go and I guess kind of related to that um not so much about businesses but it's a question in the chat from the audience about is there anything similar to carbon capture that could be put in people's homes or made
more widely available to use so I guess the idea is that most of us have gas fired boilers to for heating and hot water and they obviously emit CO2 when other greenhouse gases potentially so could I have a mini carbon capture plan and then sell the product to someone the houses probably the answer is probably you could in theory in terms of like practicality and economics probably no Gap Football League bets are off to fuel switch unfortunately what if I got together with my neighbors and we all
sort of combined to have the gas from our spoilers funnel together and put into a production plant somewhere in my local community would that work I love the idea do you live near a facility that could use the CO2 potentially yeah there might be any nuclear reactor near me that might be CO2 because I think that's a very specific case and I think that's the thing about engineering Solutions is often you are trying to select the perfect not the perfect that criteria but the criteria where it could
work and so you know I love the idea of like Community energy projects because a bigger plan is generally more efficient than lots of little individual ones because you can even out sort of saying someone doesn't ever shower in the middle of the day but someone else might do then you can sort of even it out and the boilers don't have to work as hard ah but still yeah but Laura if you do want to advocate for like carbon capture for houses right to your local MP
because they could really like try to push it in Parliament because right now Parliament and the government are really going more towards like heat pumps for houses to like replace gas to a certain extent and this is the thing a heat pump for my old 1940s really leaky house just wouldn't make sense so there has to be something else so which I guess is why you were saying hydrogen would come in so you I just replaced the boiler to one that was hydrogen ready and wait for
that to come online but that's quite a long way as well yeah so like hydrogen has had some many hurdles the way you say it feels like you personally have felt those hurdles I personally have to a certain extent because there was supposed to be a test village where they were supposed to be like the first Village that was 100 hydrogen but then the local residents were like no we don't want this so yeah hydrogen does have potential it's just there's just a lot of hurdles that it's facing in terms
of demonstrating that it is perfectly safe to use domestically and not trying to blame things like the most recent Knives Out movie but it doesn't do hydrogen any favors I remember watching that film and it just kind of washed over me I don't remember that part of knives now it's nice out too the second one yeah I've watched that as well and I do not remember when that happened I know it was something related to energy I just ignored it I have a question from
our audience brings back on track again going back to something we said quite a while ago now which method is more eco-friendly pre-combustion capture or post-combustion capture eco-friendly uh unfortunately because the post combustion is the most widely used and the other two aren't really that widely used it's difficult to actually compare on a even and fair basis because um each one will have different waste products that Juiced and will also consume different types of chemicals
which will all have different types of toxicity in back so it's quite difficult to compare directly see that kind of suggests to me that it's possible for carbon capture to be worse for the environment potentially oh yeah for sure yeah because it's not just about the emissions at the factory it's where all your other materials come from oh yeah for sure and then what you do with the matterwoods yeah when I was doing my PhD there was like another group who were
looking at alternative chemicals you can use in post-combustion carbon capture they were like comparing these green chemicals and they weren't always better than the more conventional one that's being used called minority signing glycy which I think that's what it's called mea as long as you remember the acronym that's all you need everyone knows what acronym means Nea yeah so I think one thing we were discussing was about it's about carbon credits and it was about
how you identify how much CO2 a company is producing and whether you can actually be carbon negative and I find any company that says they're carbon negative I just I really wonder what they mean by that because I don't know the the calculations and the energy well enough to know what that final conclusion is based on with carbon negative you need really accurate carbon accounting for one both in terms of how much you're emitting but also how much you're planning to remove was it Brew
dog who were claiming to be the world's first carbon negative Beer Company because they were gonna plant a load of trees in Scotland so they'd have lots of credits from the mother CO2 that would be removed from all these trees there's a lot of factors that go into how much CO2 a tree is going to remove because you need to figure out like what okay how long is this tree going to live how many are going to survive to maturity and also the amount of CO2 that gets removed it varies depending on like
weather conditions as well as just like General Health of the tree any kind of like carbon accounting or carbon credits using any of these agroforestry projects this really high uncertainty on like whether or not they're actually going to be negative wow so I like the idea of planting trees because it sounds like a good thing for the environment it creates habitats and all sorts but I can also see why there would be all that variability so if you're essentially
saying that the best way to do it is to engineer it using known Technologies like capture using amines the fast way but it's like the most accurate way so like if you engineer a facility that you know is going to remove one ton of CO2 it's most definitely going to remove that want in a CO2 whereas if you want to achieve that through trees it's a lot more uncertain there could be uses for those trees I know one of the previous episodes we've had about building
skyscrapers the construction industry is looking to use wood as a replacement for steel because steel limit CO2 trees are more renewable but of course you have to wait for your trees to grow so it's got to be a limit there as well yeah I'd agree with Jasmine but forestry in a forestry where you planting trees where we've DeForest is all really important for various environmental things so it's just whether or not you should count that as a credit and start using that in
accounting especially if it's not happened yet yeah I would say that if you were to like plant trees I would put other benefits above using it for carbon credit for like habitat benefits or just like General improvements to Nature benefits also air quality benefits so a lot more wins than just sucking CO2 out of the air which you would do with your engineered method yeah we have a couple more questions in the chat they're not directly related to CO2 capture but I
think they're quite interesting it's fine so the first one is about whether it's feasible to use renewable energy in countries that have a lot of it like the geothermal in Norway and we have a fair amount of production of electricity from wind in the UK how easy is it to distribute that to other countries that don't have that sort of capability I guess for a one that I'm aware will be index how India is really reliant on coal at the minute and still probably
will be quite a long time the thing with that is you would need to extend and have better connectivity in electricity grids so like country trees are connected and do I don't know not so much share electricity so the UK gets electricity from France because we have the subsea interconnector that connects Us and other countries in Europe they're also connected through their electricity grids there is potential you'd have to have more connectivity in the different countries that need the green
electricity I think we've started connecting to Denmark's grid as well in the UK and we also have an interconnected to the Netherlands and to Ireland the challenge becomes like the materials and the technology to be able to lay down these cables to connect countries trying to get it to other parts of the world I think we might have to use less physical means but use more like economic means or sharing knowledge of the experience we've got and they'll have to adapt it to their own
environment because the climates here are quite different so there'd be different engineering considerations depending on which part of the world you're in his different environments yeah and I guess that kind of touched on the second part of the question which is all about why can't my countries use nuclear power because fission-based nuclear reactors are one of the safest places to work according to our very knowledgeable audience participants and they're way more efficient than fossil
fuels very true really I feel like you should answer this question Laura but I think it goes back to what you were saying partly development materials but also it's about training people as you say there's a need to share all that knowledge and upscale people and the Nations that have nuclear power have sort of gone through a bit of Renaissance themselves like in the UK we had a huge boom in creating nuclear power stations in the sort of 60s 70s 80s and then that tailed off for
political reasons and also because we discovered we had lots of natural gas in the north city yes so it wasn't really needed yeah whereas now that is changing again and we're saying yes we really need nuclear to help with the whole climate change and mission of CO2 so let's go that way as for Fusion there's a saying in the nuclear industry that Fusion will always be 30 years away it's still 30 years away us away oh maybe let's come down a little bit it just feels a little bit more tangible
these days yeah there's definitely a lot of research in the area so I'm sure they will get there but it is still uh fairly there's an awful lot of research left to do still it's nowhere near as mature I find it in Daily when it comes like public attitudes students for like okay so I'm probably gonna get this wrong but uh for the is it Vision that's the one that's used mostly right now in infusions the other one right so like I do as well so with vision there's like a lot of like
anxiety about it because we've had quite a few nuclear disasters related to fission reactors but with Fusion like this there tends to be generally like more public acceptance because one there's no you don't get any nuclear waste you don't get as much visual waste for sure yeah I don't get some merch so because it's yeah it's quite interesting because like in Germany they decommissioned all their nuclear power plants following the Fukushima incident because just because
it concerns even though uh Germany is probably not going to have a tsunami anytime soon or experience a tsunami but yeah it's just like there was a lot of concerns following Fukushima and then Germany decided yeah we'll just uh decommission of our nuclear power plants but that resulted in them using more coal because they still need electricity again the UK is currently it was about 20 of our Energy Mix was nuclear it's gone down a little bit because a few
plants have closed so there is a need to have more plants to fill that Gap but I suppose that's part of it is that calm capture storage isn't a technology in isolation it's got to be what are the alternatives to not capturing the carbon or what benefits are there if we do capture the carbon it's a sort of a follow-on from the talk about nuclear there is definitely need to decarbonize the electricity production and nuclear is a good way of doing that but there can also be uses of the CO2 that are
captured from gas-fired Power stations I think I'm advocating just keep using gas but that's not necessarily what I'm saying yeah especially with the high gas prices please don't but for some of those industries that are more difficult to come organized like steel production and cement manufacturers beer making yeah you kind of need carbon capture because a lot of the alternative is you make a completely different product yeah so I guess that's probably quite a good
place to sum up there's a need to decarbonize electricity there are certain industries that are much more difficult to decarbonize and that's why carbon capture and using it rather than storage should probably come in and that generates a whole other economy of creating other products that require carbon in them in some way thank you to our audience yeah thanks everyone thank you all for listening and tune in for another episode soon the views expressed in this podcast
belong entirely to the person that said them they do not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views it would really help us out if you could rate US leave a review and tell a friend this podcast was sponsored by no one but if you're interested in funding us to continue to have Frank discussions about science and engineering please get in touch [Music]