Natural Resources Canada is providing additional funding to Quebec City-based CO2 Solutions Inc. The company will use $255,000 from the department’s ecoENERGY Innovation Initiative to conduct testing of its carbon capture technology.

Specifically, the money will allow CO2 Solutions to further test its enzyme-based carbon capture process in a rotating packed bed (RPB) technology configuration. The objective of the additional tests is to demonstrate the potential to significantly reduce the cost of CO2 capture in this configuration.

"Our planned integrated pulp mill/greenhouse project in Quebec, for which we recently announced $2.4 million in SDTC funding, is a prime example of where we intend to leverage the results of this testing programme,” explained Evan Price, president and CEO at CO2 Solutions. “With this funding, we can accelerate the development of this second equipment solution, which is complementary to our packed column technology offering, which was already proven at a scale sufficient for commercial applications."

CO2 Solutions inked an agreement with GasTrans Systems (GTS) in June 2015 GasTran Systems ("GTS"), giving the company exclusive use of GTS's rotating packed bed technology for CO2 capture. Initial joint testing at a scale of approximately 0.5 tonnes per day (tpd) of CO2 captured showed that using the GTS RPB equipment can potentially lead to a 20-fold reduction in the size of capture equipment as compared to a conventional packed tower approach. This has the potential of significantly reducing capital costs associated with the application of carbon capture technology, as well as increasing the applicability of CO2 capture at many industrial locations where space and footprint considerations are as important as cost.

The additional funding will be used for an expansion of the currently planned testing program involving a larger-scale RPB-based system. The test unit will be built and assembled in Quebec, and shipped for testing, scheduled to commence this summer at a leading independent US-based test facility. The objective of the program is to determine design and costing parameters for the commercial application of the RPB technology.