Energy Dome Offers a Step Forward For CCS

Energy Dome, an Italian energy storage technology company founded in 2019, claims to use CO2 against climate change to develop long duration storage systems, based on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)

Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions form the biggest share of emission worldwide and necessitating a decarbonization of the energy industry to solve the climate change issue. Energy Dome proposes a solution to this problem. More importantly, at a levelised cost of $100/MW for storage, the firm has still got some way to go to reach the costs of $35-50/MW  to be considered truly viable for mass scale adoption. The firm hopes to get their with more scale.

CO2 is the perfect fluid to store energy cost effectively in a closed thermodynamic process as it is one of the few gases that can be condensed and stored as a liquid under pressure at ambient temperature, says the company. This is said to allow for high density energy storage without the need to go at extreme cryogenic temperatures.

Under the company’s proprietary technology, in charging mode, the CO2 is drawn from an atmospheric gas-holder, the Dome, compressed and then stored under pressure at ambient temperature in a high density supercritical or liquid state. When energy needs to be released, the CO2 is evaporated and expanded into a turbine, and then returned back to the atmospheric gas-holder, ready for the next charging cycle.

“By storing in the liquid phase at ambient temperature, we significantly reduce the typical storage costs associated with CAES (Compressed Air Energy Storage) without having to deal with cryogenic temperatures associated with LAES (Liquid Air Energy Storage),” the company claims.

Last month, Energy Dome announced the close of its $11 million Series A fundraise, planned to be utilised to complete the construction of its CO2 Battery demonstration project in Sardinia, Italy, and to accelerate the growth of the business. “…CO2 Battery achieves a 75-80% round-trip efficiency. And, unlike lithium-ion batteries that suffer significant performance degradation during their 7-10 year design life, the CO2 Battery maintains its performance during its expected 25 year operational life. Consequently, the cost of storing energy will be about half of the cost of storing with similar sized lithium-ion batteries,” the company said.

What makes the solution tantalising is the option to collect CO2 from the atmosphere at scale, a way to effectively reverse past wrongs if it works. Readers will note that many of the firms and countries promising net zero by 2050 have predicated their promises on the development of carbon capture and storage technologies  that can work at scale and at a cost that is acceptable. The Energy Dome claim and set up is a step in that direction, though we will continue to advocate for doing more in the here and now, by way of both greener generation and more efficiency, than hope for a solution of the future to take care of issues.