Dec 27 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Chris Mulick Tri-City Herald, Kennewick, Wash.

Energy Northwest is abandoning plans to consider injecting some carbon dioxide emissions underground at its proposed Pacific Mountain Energy Center near Kalama.

The 793-megawatt project initially was touted as a candidate for the country's first large-scale power station that would burn a gas derived from a slurry of coal or petroleum coke and permanently store some carbon dioxide emissions underground.

But the public power consortium, pursuing its most ambitious project since its failed nuclear construction campaign in the 1970s and early 1980s, said it couldn't promise to capture carbon and store it in rock formations.

And after a brief tussle with the state's Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council over the reading of the state's new emissions-capping greenhouse gas law, Energy Northwest has decided to scrap the idea.

Instead, it'll amend its site certificate application and reconfigure the $1.5 billion project with a different operations plan to get it under the emissions cap. That could be done by adding cleaner fuels to the fuel mix, such as natural gas, that would likely cost more.

"We certainly don't expect it would be less," said Energy Northwest spokesman Brad Peck.

Energy Northwest doesn't save much by ditching what is known as carbon sequestration. It had only committed $60 million in project funds to promote it. But retrofitting the project to make it ready to deliver carbon underground -- something that hasn't yet been studied at the site -- would have cost far more.

Energy Northwest announced the project in 2005 as an innovative way to meet what it expects to be robust demand for electricity in the coming years. It was to produce more carbon dioxide than modern natural gas plants but less than conventional coal plants and -- should the method ever prove viable -- some of the emissions could be stored underground.

But this year the Legislature rewrote state law requiring new plants to emit no more carbon dioxide than a modern gas plant.

The new law made an exception for the project. It required Energy Northwest to submit a "full and sufficient technical documentation to support the planned sequestration."

And if the public power consortium made a good faith effort to do so -- but still failed -- it could use other methods to reduce its carbon contribution, such as buying an old coal plant to shut it down.

Last month the siting council rejected Energy Northwest's greenhouse gas reduction plan because it laid out a menu of possible activities but didn't commit to any specific steps.

Energy Northwest asked the council to clarify that order earlier this month and last week the council issued a response that only strengthened its argument against the greenhouse gas reduction plan, finding it "to be contrary to the clear meaning of the statute."

The response also rejected Energy Northwest's argument the council merely didn't understand what was being proposed.

"The council understands what the plan contains, and pointed out provisions that it does not contain," council Chairman Jim Luce wrote.

Energy Northwest responded with a statement announcing plans to submit a revised project proposal within 60 days.

"We regret the necessity to eliminate the potential sequestration component believing that PMEC could have contributed a great deal to the advancement of permanent geologic sequestration of greenhouse gases," it read.