OREANDA-NEWS. Toshiba Corporation announced that it has signed an agreement with Saga, the capital city of Saga Prefecture on Japan's Kyushu Island, on the installation of a carbon capture and utilization system (CCU) in a biomass energy utilization project that is being promoted by Saga. The CCU test plant will be able to capture 20-kilograms of CO2 a day and will be used to test and verify the capture and utilization of CO2 from the flue gas of the city's waste incineration plant.

Installation of the equipment is scheduled to be completed by September and testing is to start in October. It will be the first CCU verification test in Japan to apply chemical absorption technology in an incineration plant.

CCU is a countermeasure to climate change that cuts CO2 emissions by collecting and making use of CO2 which would otherwise be released into the atmosphere. The Saga project aims to collect CO2 emitted from the city's incineration plant and to utilize it for crop cultivation and algae culture. Once the technology is proved, Saga expects to promote it at the commercial scale and to use it to attract companies that will contribute to revitalization of the local economy. The project is being coordinated by Saga with the participation of Toshiba, Ebara Environmental Plant Co., Ltd., Kyushu Electric Power Co., Inc. and Saga Environmental Science Inspection Association. It will continue until the end of FY2014.

In 2009, Toshiba constructed a carbon capture pilot plant at Mikawa Power Plant in Omuta City in Fukuoka Prefecture, which is continuing verification operations at a scale of 10 tons a day. Toshiba has drawn on this experience for the design of the Saga CCU test plant.

Toshiba expects to identify and verify technical issues and analyze the economic potential of operating a CCU at the incineration plant, and to support Saga in planning commercial application of the technology.