Ryan Cownden

OIES-KAPSARC Research Fellow

Ryan Cownden is a Research Fellow at OIES and President of Cownden Engineering, a consulting company focused on the energy industry. He has 27 years of diverse design and project management experience in the energy industry, including hydrogen fuel cell power generation, wind turbines, and upstream oil and gas production.

He is currently a PhD student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Sheffield, UK where he is developing process designs to produce electricity and hydrogen from natural gas with net-zero life cycle greenhouse gas emissions using carbon capture and storage.

Ryan holds a MSc in Carbon Management from the University of Edinburgh, UK and a BEng in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Victoria, Canada. His MSc research showed that hydrogen with life cycle greenhouse gas emissions comparable to wind-powered electrolysis could be produced from natural gas using existing technology and carbon capture and storage.

Contact

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Energy-from-waste (EfW) is a waste treatment process that combusts residual waste after re-use, recycling and composting to produce energy in the form of electricity and/or heat. In the UK, the EfW sector contributes around 3% of total national power output, but also 3.5% of overall territorial GHG emissions, making its decarbonisation critical. CCS has emerged as a promising decarbonisation solution. As waste is composed of fossil and biogenic content, retrofitting EfW with CCS has the potential to reduce emissions (by capturing fossil CO2) but also generate valuable negative emissions (by capturing biogenic CO2) which can contribute to the UK’s negative emissions targets.

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Energy-from-waste (EfW) is a waste treatment process that combusts residual waste after re-use, recycling and composting to produce energy in the form of electricity and/or heat. In the UK, the EfW sector contributes around 3% of total national power output, but also 3.5% of overall territorial GHG emissions, making its decarbonisation critical. CCS has emerged as a promising decarbonisation solution. As waste is composed of fossil and biogenic content, retrofitting EfW with CCS has the potential to reduce emissions (by capturing fossil CO2) but also generate valuable negative emissions (by capturing biogenic CO2) which can contribute to the UK’s negative emissions targets.

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Latest Publications by Ryan Cownden