Conor Hamill, co-CEO at Nuada, has said that the business is now ready to move “from demonstration to commercial-scale deployment”, following the successful completion of its second carbon capture pilot project.
The Northern Ireland-based carbon capture firm’s second pilot plant, Nuada Scout, is located at the Energy Innovation Centre (formerly TERC) at the University of Sheffield, and has successfully captured one tonne of CO₂ per day from biomass-derived flue gases, with ‘high purity and stable performance’, according to the firm.
Its solution uses a metal-organic framework (MOF) sorbent to selectively absorb CO₂, before releasing it using vacuum pressure. This process uses 90% less energy than traditional carbon capture methods, and is designed to be compact and easy to integrate into existing industrial sites.
‘Conventional carbon capture methods rely on energy-intensive processes and require large, capital-heavy installations,’ the company said. ‘Their complexity and infrastructure demands make carbon capture deployment costly and disruptive for industrial emitters/sites. In contrast, Nuada’s approach has the potential to eliminate the need for large chemical processing systems, offering a compact, easy-to-integrate and lower-energy solution suitable for widespread industrial deployment.’
‘From aspiration to implementation’
“Our low-energy, compact system removes the cost and integration complexity barriers that have long held back industrial carbon capture,” Hamill commented. “Carbon capture must move from aspiration to implementation. This pilot proves that Nuada’s technology is ready to meet that challenge practically, affordably and at scale.”
This second pilot follows earlier success with cement flue gas and was funded under the UK government’s CCUS Innovation 2.0 programme, part of the £1 billion Net Zero Innovation Portfolio.
Nuada technology
Nuada‘s stated goal is to ‘decarbonise heavy industries through its next-generation point-source capture technology’, known as MOF-VPSA, which can be installed ‘end of pipe’.
According to the firm, the ease of integration lowers barriers to CCUS (carbon capture, utilisation and storage) adoption – crucial to making large-scale industrial decarbonisation more viable. Read more here.
