Jun 20 - Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News - Erik Robinson The Columbian, Vancouver, Wash.

With the Trojan Nuclear Plant reduced to a heap of rubble, a consortium of public power agencies is proposing to go back to the future with a new power plant directly across the Columbia River.

The new plant would tap a 19th-century form of energy: coal.

Despite coal's reputation as a toxic pollutant, proponents of the 600-megawatt energy plant at the Port of Kalama contend that the plant may hold the key to reducing the threat of global warming.

Energy Northwest, a consortium of 19 public power agencies in Washington, expects to apply for a permit later this summer to build a plant capable of burning gasified coal at the Port of Kalama. The $1 billion plant would be the first on the West Coast capable of breaking down coal and other fossil fuels into component parts, stripping out harmful elements such as mercury and sulfur, and burning the remaining gas to generate electricity.

Conservation groups aren't exactly running to embrace the process known as Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle but they also haven't dismissed it out of hand.

"We're pretty hopeful that coal-based IGCC will actually work," said Sara Patton, executive director of NW Energy Coalition, which promotes conservation and renewable forms of energy. "If you can get that to work, then you can replace the smudge pots in the Midwest, the East Coast and China."

By stripping out soot and other regulated pollutants, Energy Northwest bills the plant as a clean alternative to conventional coal plants. Spokesman Brad Peck said the proposed Pacific Mountain Energy Center also will emit 20 percent to 25 percent less carbon dioxide a key contributor to the greenhouse effect warming the globe.

Capturing carbon

Energy Northwest has raised hopes of a more tantalizing environmental payoff: the ability to capture carbon dioxide and permanently store it deep underground.

The consortium plans to spend an extra $35 million modifying the plant so that, in the future, it would be able to capture massive quantities of carbon dioxide and then inject it into ancient lava flows nearly a mile underground. Energy companies have already injected comparatively small amounts of carbon dioxide to improve the recovery of oil and natural gas from depleted fields.

"We think it's potentially a really good sink," said Susan Capalbo, director of the Big Sky Carbon Sequestration Partnership. In time, the carbon dioxide would solidify and bind to the existing basalt.

There's just one problem: The technology necessary to make it happen doesn't exist yet, and no one's sure how much it would add to the cost of operating the plant even if it did.

Capalbo, who is based at Montana State University in Bozeman, said the partnership expects to inject a small amount of carbon dioxide into a similar basalt formation in Eastern Washington within the next two years. It will be another five or six years before the technique can be applied at a plant such as the one envisioned in Kalama, she said.

That would be just about the time Energy Northwest expects to have its 600-megawatt Kalama project built and running. Peck, the consortium's spokesman, estimated the new plant would produce energy for about $40 to $45 per megawatt-hour, not including the cost of the new technology to capture and store carbon dioxide.

"No one knows what the cost would be," he said. "It might add $10 to the cost of a megawatt-hour of electricity."

By comparison, Clark Public Utilities anticipates it will be able to produce 248 megawatts at its natural gas-fired River Road Generating Plant for about $50 per megawatt-hour in 2011, although that assumes natural gas prices will fall. The Northwest Power and Conservation Council anticipates it will cost an average of $37 per megawatt-hour to generate energy at new wind farms. Existing hydropower sources produce at less than half of that cost.

The NW Energy Coalition, which is promoting a renewable energy initiative in Washington, is skeptical about a plant at Kalama.

Marc Krasnowsky, communications director, said the world could benefit if coal gasification and carbon sequestration technology is successfully developed. But he said even a "clean" coal plant makes no sense here.

"If you did your test in New Jersey or Illinois, and replaced a dirty coal plant with such a thing, you would get a net decrease (in carbon dioxide emissions) or at least you'd be staying even," he said, adding that there is no need for such a plant here. "We have more than enough renewable energy and energy efficiency to meet our needs."

The Northwest Power and Conservation Council's new regional energy blueprint calls for investments in conservation and energy efficiency first.

The plan emphasizes wind generation after that.

Finally, it figures traditional heat-burning energy sources will be needed as soon as 2015 to ensure there is enough electricity to meet growing demand.

"For new thermal generation, we favor gasified coal," said John Harrison, spokesman for the four-state power and conservation council. "Natural gas prices are highly volatile."

Because wind blows erratically, it can't meet all the projected power demand.

That's why Energy Northwest is focused on using coal and petroleum coke, a byproduct of the oil refining process. With the nation sitting atop more than two centuries of coal reserves, the consortium portrays its Kalama plant as a prudent investment especially if the current flurry of new wind-generation projects peters out.

"We could find ourselves short of power again, in the not-too-distant future," Peck said. "What are the consequences if we do come up short of power?"