New York City buildings turn to carbon capture

印刷用画面を開く

Posted

Category: (Self-Study) Science/Environment

Switch to Watch View >

Storyline

Hide Storyline

From the outside, the residential high-rise on Manhattan’s Upper West Side looks pretty much like any other luxury building: A doorman greets visitors in a spacious lobby adorned with tapestry and marble.

Yet just below in the basement is an unusual set of equipment that no other building in New York City — indeed few in the world — can claim.

In an effort to drastically reduce the 30-story building’s emissions, the owners have installed a maze of twisting pipes and tanks that collect carbon dioxide from the massive, gas-fired boilers in the basement before that exhaust goes to the chimney where it would normally be released into the air.

The goal is to stop carbon dioxide, a climate-warming gas, from entering the atmosphere. And there’s a dire need for reducing emissions from the city’s skyscrapers. Buildings are by far the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions here, roughly two-thirds, according to the buildings department. Many of those aging buildings have decades-old boilers in the basement which vent carbon dioxide directly into the air.

So building owners must make dramatic cuts starting next year or face escalating fines under a new city law. About 50,000 structures — more than half the buildings in the city, regardless of age — are subject to the law, known as Local Law 97. Other cities such as Boston and Denver followed suit with similar rules.

As a result, property managers are scrambling to change how their buildings operate. Some are installing carbon capture systems, which strip out carbon dioxide, direct it into tanks and prepare it for sale to other companies to make carbonated beverages, soap or concrete.

They see it as a way to meet emissions goals without having to relocate residents for extensive renovations. In this case, the carbon dioxide is sold to a concrete manufacturer in Brooklyn, where it’s turned into a mineral and permanently embedded in concrete.

Carbon capture technology has existed on an industrial scale for decades, used by oil and gas companies and some manufacturing plants to capture climate-warming carbon dioxide and either sell it or use it to wrestle more oil from underground.

This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Script

Hide Script

[Door to carbon capture room]

Brian Asparro (interview): “Carbon capture systems within buildings are designed to reduce carbon emissions from natural gas combustion devices such as boilers for heating and hot water. In cities like New York, natural gas emissions are the single highest category of emissions. And that’s the problem that we are trying to solve.”

[Carbon capture system in basement of residential building]

[Ravenswood Generating Station, a power plant that emits natural gas]

Claire Nelson (interview): “These kinds of laws do encourage building owners to adopt technologies like carbon capture and hopefully that doesn’t come at the cost of discouraging them from exploring all of their options to electrify everything.”

[Buildings in New York]

Brian Asparro (interview): “The technology is currently implemented here in this multifamily property in the Upper West Side. First we capture the exhaust coming off of a boiler or a cogeneration system to prevent carbon dioxide from going out a chimney. Second, we separate the carbon dioxide from the other gases. Third, we liquefy that carbon dioxide. And fourth, we transfer and sell that to users of that carbon dioxide like concrete manufacturers.”

[Grand Tier building in the Upper West Side, which has a carbon capture system in the basement]

[Carbon capture infrastructure]

[Truck carrying liquid carbon dioxide leaving the Upper West Side residential building carbon capture system to transport the liquid carbon dioxide to Glenwood Mason Supply in Brooklyn]

Jeff Hansen (interview): “You put it in a truck, take it here to Brooklyn, and we store it into an onsite tank. From that onsite tank, it goes through plumbing, through our plant, and into the mixer. The CO2 is then injected into the mix and that becomes a solid. It goes through the mineralization process.”

[Cement block factory]

Claire Nelson (interview): “And that aspect of this is what is causing this storage to be permanent, because once CO2 is converted into a solid, it will stay there forever. So historically, carbon capture and storage has been done in the oil and gas industry to recover more oil out of the ground by pushing CO2 underground and pulling more oil up.”

[Oil and gas drilling complex]

Brian Asparro (interview): “In terms of the criticism with delaying the transition over from fossil fuels, what we would say is, a ton of carbon reduced today is worth more than a ton of carbon reduced tomorrow.”

[Flare burning at Venture Global liquefied natural gas in Cameron]

[Buildings in Manhattan Financial District]

Claire Nelson (interview): “A better, more sustainable way is to just wean off of fossil fuels altogether and decarbonize as a global economy, which is no small task. So in the meantime, an amazing approach to doing this is to adapt carbon capture and storage technologies. But it’s just something that we need to do, like flushing our toilets or taking out the trash.”

[Cement block factory]

This script was provided by The Associated Press.

Related Lesson: New York City buildings turn to carbon capture