startupfortune.com
Chinese scientists have built a coal-powered battery that generates electricity with zero CO2 emissions
A team at Shenzhen University led by Chinese Academy of Sciences member Xie Heping has developed the world’s first zero-carbon-emission direct coal fuel cell, generating electricity from coal without combustion and without producing carbon dioxide. Coal and zero emissions are not two phrases that belong in the same sentence. Until now. A research team in China has built a device that places coal inside what is functionally a battery, extracts electricity from it electrochemically rather than by burning it, and produces no carbon dioxide in the process. If that sounds like it should be impossible, that reaction is precisely why the result is worth paying close attention to. The device is called a zero-carbon-emission direct coal fuel cell, or ZC-DCFC, and it was developed by a team led by Xie Heping at Shenzhen University. The core distinction from conventional coal power is the elimination of combustion entirely. Traditional coal-fired generation burns coal to produce heat, uses that heat to boil water, drives a steam turbine, and converts mechanical energy into electricity, a chain of energy conversions that is inherently inefficient and produces CO2 at the combustion stage as a fundamental byproduct. The ZC-DCFC bypasses that entire chain by converting the...