PODCAST: Ryan Kammer & Matt Fry, Great Plains Institute

In Season 2, Episode 12, of the Carbon Capture Magazine podcast series, we chatted with Ryan Kammer, Carbon Management Research Manager and Matt Fry, Senior Policy Advisor at the Great Plains Institute (GPI). The focus of the discussion was GPI’s recently released Carbon Capture Co-benefits report. This first-of-its-kind study observes and quantifies health impact of the co-benefits of reducing other air pollutants with carbon capture technologies.

CCM: Since we last had GPI on the podcast, you have released a Carbon Capture Co-Benefits report. Could you share with us what all is covered in this report and what
GPI’s objective was in releasing it?
Kammer: We’re really hoping that we could provide the message that carbon capture is more than just a climate solution. It can also improve air quality around various sources in both industry and power. When you’re using an amine-based solvent or low purity carbon capture, you’re typically wanting to also remove SO2, NOx and particular matter from your system so that it can work optimally. And in doing so that you’re also improving the air quality for both of the area around the facility, but then also across the country and across regions as air travels. So, we really wanted to quantify what that health benefit would be for removing CO2, but also SO2, NOx and particulate matter for facilities across the country.

Fry: I’ll just add we get questioned a lot about the benefits outside of climate solutions are, like Ryan mentioned, so this was a first-of-its-kind opportunity to actually quantify that and answer some of the questions that we hear routinely from communities and stakeholders.

CCM: Ryan, you mentioned some of the different pollutants that are included in the research.
It also spans across several industries. What materials or regulations did you observe to help develop this report?
Kammer: There were too many sources that we used to design the study itself to talk about here, but there were a couple NETL reports that were really impactful. One that was published 2019 that was looking at carbon capture for coal power plants and then one in 2022 surrounding various industrial capture opportunities. Those were really helpful for us to kind of understand what equipment we would assume to be installed for these various opportunities as well as what the estimated cost and the estimated removal efficiencies would be for removing these various co-pollutants. Finally, we wanted to be conservative with the estimates that we were making so that our health benefits would also be conservative. So we decided to use equipment that would meet the EPA’s new source performance standards, specifically for pulverized coal technology installed post 2011. They have the highest allowed emissions amounts. So by doing that, we were hoping to be conservative with our estimates.

CCM: How do those co-pollutants impact amine-based capture systems? To quantify the benefits of capturing CO2 and these other co-pollutants, your team developed an approach. Can you walk us through this approach and what exactly the benefits were that you were quantifying? Through this approach, what conclusions were you able to draw across the nation and across each of these industries that you observed? How do you anticipate this information will affect the deployment and the public perception of carbon management systems? Listen to Ryan and Matt’s response by visiting https://carboncapturemagazine.com/pages/podcasts/.

Printed in Issue 2, 2023 of Carbon Capture Magazine