Berkeley Lab Offers Ultraclean Combustion Technology For Electricity Generation

An experimental gas turbine simulator equipped with an ultralow-emissions combustion technology called LSI has been tested successfully using pure hydrogen as a fuel - a milestone that indicates a potential to help eliminate millions of tons of carbon dioxide and thousands of tons of NOx from power plants each year. The LSI (low-swirl injector) technology, developed by Robert Cheng of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, recently won a 2007 R and D 100 award from R and D magazine as one of the top 100 new technologies of the year.

The LSI holds great promise for its near-zero emissions of nitrogen oxides, gases that are emitted during the combustion of fuels such as natural gas during the production of electricity. Nitrogen oxides, or NOx, are greenhouse gases as well as components of smog.

The Department of Energy's Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability initially funded the development of the LSI for use in industrial gas turbines for on-site (i.e. distributed) electricity production. The purpose of this research was to develop a natural gas-burning turbine using the LSI's ability to substantially reduce NOx emissions.
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