From the outside, the residential high-rise on Manhattan’s Upper West Side looks pretty much like any other luxury building: A doorman greets visitors in a spacious lobby adorned with tapestry and marble.
In an effort to drastically reduce the 30-story building’s emissions, the owners have installed a maze of twisting pipes and tanks that collect carbon dioxide from the massive, gas-fired boilers in the basement before it goes to the chimney and is released into the air.
CAPTURING THE CULPRIT
In the basement of the Upper West Side apartment building, two hulking 500-horsepower boilers rumble, burning natural gas and releasing carbon dioxide. The boilers, which are expected to last another 10 or 20 years, produce roughly half the building’s emissions, Asparro said.
The other half of the emissions that, in the city’s view, the building is responsible for, are those generated at the power plants where the building gets its electricity. The carbon capture system, Asparro said, is trapping about 60% of the boilers’ emissions. All told then, including the electricity to power the system, it’s reducing the building’s emissions by roughly 23%.
“Boilers like this are installed everywhere, in schools and hospitals around the world,” Asparro said. “It’s a really big challenge that buildings are facing in order to reduce emissions.”
The carbon dioxide and other gases are diverted from the chimney and piped into a room where a few parking spaces have been repurposed to house the carbon capture system. The gases flow over a special material that separates out the carbon dioxide.
Then it’s compressed and cooled to minus-10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus-23 Celsius), turning it into liquid that’s then stored in tanks. That process takes energy, and capturing carbon dioxide does increase the building’s electricity use