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Welcome back to Current Climate. Spiking demand for electricity from data centers and stressed urban grids is boosting installations of large solar and battery storage systems, but there’s still a huge need for reliable base power generation to supplement renewable power. Natural gas plants fill that role, but demand for new turbines far outstrips supply, leading to wait times of five years or more from manufacturers such as Siemens and GE Vernova.

Brad Hartwig, a former SpaceX rocket engineer, thinks he can solve the problem – and cut carbon emissions at the same time. Arbor, his Los Angeles-area startup, developed a turbine that’s about a fifth the size of conventional units and that can be made relatively fast using 3D printers. Its rocket engine-inspired design has the added benefit of making it easy to capture carbon dioxide for sequestration. It even produces water as a byproduct.

“Instead of burning fuel with air like a traditional gas turbine, we're burning it with oxygen as you do in a rocket engine,” Hartwig told Forbes. “When you burn your fuel with pure oxygen, you end up with just CO2 and water. Normally, when you burn natural gas and air in a regular gas turbine, you also get CO2 and water, but you also get a whole lot of hot air. And all of that goes out the smokestack into the atmosphere.”

“What we're doing, which is called oxy combustion, makes it so that you're only getting CO2 and water as your combustion product – no hot air, no nitrogen. What that allows you to do is expand that gas through a high-pressure turbine, condense the water out, and then you have a pure stream of high-pressure, high-purity, dry CO2 that can be directly sequestered in geologic formation. So it's........

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