JFE Engineering Corporation, a leading engineering company in Japan, announced on November 18, 2010, that it had successfully developed a breakthrough technology to capture and store carbon dioxide (CO2). The new technology can convert CO2 to CO2 hydrate under normal temperature and pressure, thereby reducing processing costs by half.

Conventionally, converting CO2 in water to CO2-hydrate, a sherbet-like solid compound, requires low temperature and high pressure conditions (e.g. 5 degrees Celsius at a pressure of 2.2 MPa or higher). The processing costs of this method, however, are very high, which has hampered its practical application.

The company devised a new method that includes the addition of a small amount of “Neo-White” into a mixture of water and microbubbled CO2, which accelerates the formation of CO2-hydrate. “Neo-White” is also known as “Clathrate Hydrate Slurry,” a thermal energy storage medium jointly developed by JFE and the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), which forms a hydrate slurry state at around 7 degrees Celsius. According to JFE, a bench scale test (three tons per day) has confirmed that CO2 could be hydrated, captured and stored under atmospheric pressure (18 degrees Celsius at a pressure of 0.11 MPa).

The operating costs are thought to be approximately 2500 JPY (about U.S.$30.86) per ton of CO2 at the actual plant scale, which is almost half the operating costs of the conventional chemical absorption process. JFE now plans to conduct verification tests of 0.3 to 1 million tons per year at larger scale facilities.