China is the first nation to have installed commercial CO₂-driven turbines for commercial electric power production. It is a small, dual-turbine pilot plant with two 15 MW turbines that use waste heat at a steam smelter to produce electricity. For the particular industrial waste heat application, the efficiency is 50% higher than that of a traditional steam turbine cycle.
The new technology is based on the unique property of highly pressurized and 500°C-hot supercritical CO₂, which unifies the super-high energy density of a liquid with the low resistance of a gas to produce, with a very low thermal loss ratio, electric energy in a space approximately 4 to 10 times smaller than conventionally used steam turbines today.
