CO2 Battery

[PierreB]

CO2 Battery | Thermodynamic Long-Duration Energy Storage

According this website:

The only viable alternative for long-duration energy storage

The CO2 Battery in a nutshell

• Closed thermodynamic transformation

• Manipulation of CO2 between its gaseous and liquid phase

• CO2 warms up, evaporates, and expands, turning a turbine to generate electricity

• Energy storage sweet spot between 8/24 hours

• Zero CO2 emissions into the atmosphere during the entire process

• No cryogenic temperatures and high costs that are typically associated with compressed air energy storage

• Massive reduction of costs by storing the CO2 at ambient temperature in its liquid phase

• Patented technology that uses only water, steel, and CO2

• All components are readily available worldwide from multiple Tier 1 suppliers

“Energy Dome’s technology uses a thermodynamic cycle, charging by drawing carbon dioxide from a ‘Dome’ gasholder, storing it under pressure, and then dispatching it by evaporating and expanding the gas through a turbine back into the gasholder.”

CO2 is the solution for long-duration energy storage

At the core of our solution, there’s our patented CO2-based technology. This is the only alternative to expensive, unsustainable lithium batteries currently used for energy storage. The CO2 Battery is a better-value, better-quality solution that solves your energy storage needs, so you can start transitioning to alternative energy sources today.

	CO2 Battery	Lithium-Ion battery
Round Trip Efficiency	75%+ (no degradation over time)	85% (high degradation over time)
Lifetime	30+ Years	<12 Years
CAPEX	1x	1.7x
Depth of Discharge (DoD)	100%	<80%
Components Availability	Global	Limited
No Critical Materials
Physical Inertia
Off-the-shelf Components
Installation Time	<2 years	<2 years

Some information on

‘CO2 battery’ technology getting megawatt-scale demonstrator in Italy

My take: as a start, this could be a complement of the ground station for reeling AWES, for temporary storage during reel-in recovery phase.

[PierreB]

Energy Dome's CO2 Battery™ to Revolutionize U.S. Energy Landscape With First...

MILAN – September 22, 2023 – A groundbreaking development in sustainable energy storage is on the horizon for Columbia County, Wisconsin, U.S., spearheaded by Alliant Energy in collaboration with Energy Dome and other key stakeholders. Alliant Energy has just announced its selection to receive a federal grant of up to approximately $30 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) for the pioneering Columbia Energy Storage Project, a proposed 200-megawatt hour energy storage system, based on Energy Dome’s signature technology: the CO2 Battery™.[…]

Energy Dome is revolutionizing energy storage and enabling grid decarbonization by making solar and wind power dispatchable 24/7. The company invented and developed the CO2 Battery™, a long-duration energy storage system that makes long-duration energy storage viable globally today. The properties of carbon dioxide allow the system to store energy efficiently and cost-effectively, with a modular and site-independent footprint. CO2 Batteries™ use readily available, off-the-shelf components from reliable, existing supply chains, providing a scalable pathway to store massive amounts of intermittent renewable energy and accelerate the energy transition.

CO2 Battery | Energy Dome

Investors interviews on the CO2 Battery from Energy Dome

New Long-Duration Energy Storage Technologies that help us geto to 100% Renewables off the grid

First of its kind 'energy dome' coming to Alliant Energy

[Storm_Eagle]

That gigantic dome to contain the CO2 when it is “spent” at atmospheric pressure can not be cheap to make.

CO2 expands over 500 times in volume from liquid to gas at atmospheric pressure. So the dome has to be over 500 times larger than the tank farms for the liquid CO2.

The benefit of liquified air is that you don’t have to contain it when it is converted into gas. Just release it back into the atmosphere. And you can get pretty good round trip efficiency from liquified air to if you store and use the heat energy from the compression.

[Windy_Skies]

@Storm_Eagle

That gigantic dome to contain the CO2 when it is “spent” at atmospheric pressure can not be cheap to make.

OTOH, that seems to be about the only custom part, and from the quote below, from the company: But this is a low-cost component, requiring little more than a strong but flexible PVC-coated textile, which is already manufactured for use in biogas plants.

How the CO2 battery could be the future of energy storage? – Undecided with Matt Ferrell

https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/yw53j1/italian_startup_energy_dome_claims_its_co2_grid/

You are underestimating the difficulty and especially the expense of dealing with cryogenic liquids, especially over the long term. Both the initial and ongoing maintenance costs of cryogenic pumps, seals, and pressure vessels is FAR more expensive than the very modest requirements for liquefying and storing CO2.

Just the fact that you can indefinitely store arbitrarily large quantities of liquefied CO2 in a room-temperature pressure vessel is a HUGE Advantage over dealing with cryogenic liquids. Bulk CO2 storage tanks and all the associated manifolds, valves, piping, and associated ancillary equipment don’t need to operate at high pressures or extreme temperatures, which means that they can be manufactured and maintained at far lower expense

https://www.reddit.com/r/RenewableEnergy/comments/vb4pxd/energy_dome_successfully_launches_first_co2/

CO2 battery utilises aspects of thermal energy storage, which stores electricity as heat, and compressed-air and liquid-air systems, which reduces the volume of air (by compressing/condensing it) and then generates electricity by allowing it to rapidly expand to its natural state, with the whoosh from that expansion driving a power-generating turbine.

In Energy Dome’s system, carbon dioxide is compressed at a pressure of 60 bar which heats the gas to 300°C liquid. The heat is then extracted and stored in “bricks” made of steel shot and quartzite for later use, cooling down the CO2 to an ambient temperature. The gas is then condensed into liquid form and stored in carbon-steel tanks.

Earthshot two: America aims to slash long-duration energy storage costs by 90% Read more

‘Our lithium-ion battery will have double the energy density of standard Li-ion for same price’ Read more When electricity is required, the liquid CO2 is run through an evaporator to turn it back to a pressurised gas, which is then warmed up back to 290-300°C causing the stored heat. The gas is then introduced into an expansion turbine, where it rapidly expands at atmospheric pressure to drive a power-generating rotor, with the uncompressed CO2 then stored in a flexible dome — hence the company name — at ambient temperature and pressure for later re-use.

Spadacini explains that Energy Dome uses CO2 because it can be converted into liquid under pressure at 30°C, compared to minus 150°C for air. Highview Power’s liquid-air battery therefore has to use cryogenic technology to liquefy air, but the Energy Dome system requires far less power, resulting in cheaper costs and a higher round-trip efficiency, the company says.

“This idea… is fully new and fully innovative, but really based on off-the-shelf components,” says Spadacini. “So we just put together existing components and this is key in order to go to the market.”

It does mean that rather than using the surrounding air, a large inflatable gas holder — ie, the dome — is needed to store the CO2 in a closed system. But this is a low-cost component, requiring little more than a strong but flexible PVC-coated textile, which is already manufactured for use in biogas plants.

He explains that an inflatable dome is required, rather than a solid steel tank, because the CO2 has to be at a constant pressure.

“If you have a sealed tank and you take gas out of that, you reduce the pressure. In the dome, the geometry adapts to the amount of gas we have inside and the pressure remains constant. This is a key feature of the system.”

Spadacini adds: “The system is totally closed. We don’t consume any CO2, it’s just the working fluid that goes back and forth… for the life of the system, over 25 years. So we have no emissions in the atmosphere.”

[dougselsam]

Another article on Energy Dome
Can a balloon-like battery push clean energy in Wisconsin? | Energy News Network

Looks like the 20 MW CO2-turbine-powered peaker-plant cost well over $60 million.
If it only runs for an hour or two per day, that will be some expensive energy.

The problem with peaker plants is that they cost about the same to build as full-time 24/7/365 plants.
Full-time plants amortize their cost 24 hours per day.
The peaker plants have to amortize the cost during the few hours they are called upon to balance the grid.
Some may only run a few times per year!

In the case of the CO2 plants, like all energy storage schemes, they must first un-create (store) the energy, then re-create (re-extract) that same energy, so these CO2 plants have to run for, just a guess here, but twice as long as they actually produce power, since they also have to compress (liquefy) the CO2 in the first place, before they can give any energy return by allowing it to boil off and expand.

Maybe, rather than worry about a dome, they could just liquefy the CO2 exhaust from a natural gas turbine, then finish releasing it to the atmosphere when done, not really adding any more CO2 to the atmosphere than the gas turbine would emit anyway, so no harm, no foul.

Could this be one more “Professor Crackpot” invention where the only thing wrong with it is its main feature?

[dougselsam]

Now that I stop and think about it, aren’t all “gas turbines” really CO2 turbines?
And what about turbines running on jet fuel etc.?
And now that I really think about it, isn’t any non-steam turbine burning fuel “really” powered by CO2?
Then again, part of the exhaust from the combustion stage would be steam.
Hey did you know they often combine a steam turbine, with its boiler powered by a gas turbine’s exhaust, making a gas turbine power plant way more efficient?