Advancements in a fuel cell technology powered by solid carbon could make electricity generation from resources such as coal and biomass cleaner and more efficient, according to a new paper published by Idaho National Laboratory researchers.

The fuel cell design incorporates innovations in three components: the anode, the electrolyte and the fuel. Together, these advancements allow the fuel cell to utilize about three times as much carbon as earlier direct carbon fuel cell (DCFC) designs.

A potential breakthrough technology is being tested in Houston—a new kind of natural-gas power plant that captures and reuses what normally goes up the smokestack: carbon dioxide, heat, and water.

If it works, NET Power’s natural-gas plant promises no carbon emissions and no water use—it produces water instead—and this is the clincher: it promises to produce electricity at a cost competitive with existing power plants.

While CO2 concentrations are now higher than they have been in at least 800,000 years, the gas still only accounts for a tiny 0.04% of our atmosphere.

However, extracting carbon dioxide from well mixed air is not just technically difficult, it's expensive as well.

Discarded solar panels are piling up all over the world, and they represent a major threat to the environment. Clean energy may not be so clean after all.

A new study by Environmental Progress (EP) warns that toxic waste from used solar panels now poses a global environmental threat.

The possible end of Southern Co.'s flagship "clean coal" project in Mississippi isn't the death knell for carbon capture and sequestration technology, industry analysts say.

Instead, the problems at the Kemper County Energy Facility — which state regulators want to turn into a natural gas plant after years of delays and cost overruns — resulted from a unique series of events and a coal gasification system that was scaled up too fast.

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GROWING UP IN ENGLAND after World War II, "all the youngsters like me were obsessed with aircraft," says Rodney Allam. "I had a picture on my wall of Chuck Yeager when he broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1, the earliest turbine-driven aircraft." Those high-powered machines were inspirational.

Derided as scientifically unsound and prohibitively expensive, carbon capture and utilisation (CCU) − the process by which carbon dioxide (CO2) is separated from industrial pollutants and converted into commercially viable products – has failed to gain serious traction since trials began 10-15 years ago.

Now however, Carbon Clean Solutions (CCSL), a London-based specialist in carbon separation technology, is set to change all that.