Jan 13 - Deseret News (Salt Lake City)

Global warming already may have hit Utah hard, but a well- financed research project headed by a University of Utah scientist is trying to do something about it.

The hit was not delivered directly by climate change. It's a financial pounding by the state of California, which is determined to unplug new power sources that would contribute significant amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. In Utah, that means a third electrical generating unit, powered by coal and projected for the Intermountain Power Project near Lynndyl, Millard County, has been called off after six years of planning.

At the heart of the debate is carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas released as pollution when power plants burn coal to produce electricity. The Environmental Protection Agency has labeled CO2 "the most important global warming gas emitted by human activities."

According to a lawsuit filed in 2006 by the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power -- which owns more of the IPP output than any other entity -- torpedoed the IPP's proposed third unit because of concerns that its greenhouse gases could contribute to global warming.

Cancellation of the 900-megawatt unit would reduce sales of power generated in Utah and undermine Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems' own plans for electricity from the unit.

However, if coal-burning power plants could be fitted with technology to sharply reduce carbon dioxide emissions, a consortium of agencies believes they could meet the strict new California requirements. Perhaps the third unit could be built after all.

Because some sort of carbon reduction rules are likely to be imposed by the federal government, and because cleaning up the environment seems like a good idea to many, with or without global warming, government and industry groups are paying many millions of dollars to find solutions.

California was the first state to pass a comprehensive CO2- reduction program. Its Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 requires that by 2020 greenhouse emissions be reduced to 1990 levels. The speaker of the California Assembly estimated that would be a 25 percent drop.

Cities in Southern California are the destination of about 10 million megawatt-hours of power from the two units of the IPP. That's out of 13 million megawatt-hours generated yearly. (A megawatt-hour is the electricity produced by generating one megawatt of electricity for one hour.)

Brian McPherson, director of the Southwest Regional Partnership for Carbon Sequestration and an associate professor at the University of Utah, said coal-powered generating facilities produce most, though by no means all, of the electricity generated in the West.

Suddenly, the market is limited for electricity derived from coal. The biggest consumer in the region, California, has set strict new standards on greenhouse gases. Any new source must be no more polluting than plants that burn natural gas, he said -- "on average about 1,100 tons per megawatt-hour of CO2."

Coal-fired plants emit 2,300 tons to 2,400 tons of CO2 per megawatt hour, McPherson said. Even if a California consortium builds a new plant in another state and transmits electricity to California, the plant "has to adhere to that 1,100 tons per megawatt- hour standard," he said.

If existing coal-burning plants were converted to nuclear, geothermal or wind-powered facilities, he said, "you're looking at several decades. Even to set up one nuclear power plant, permitting alone is 15 or 20 years."

The question is, what can be done quickly to provide electricity and reduce emissions?

Removing carbon dioxide from emissions of coal plants "can be done right now," he said. "But it's not commercially ready."

The technique is called carbon capture and sequestration.

Two types of sequestration are under study. Terrestrial sequestration would be carried out by protecting the environment so that vegetation could absorb more carbon dioxide, or by manipulating land to encourage more growth. Geological sequestration would be done by capturing carbon greenhouse gases and pumping them into geological structures deep underground.

Geological sequestration is the subject of experiments carried out by the partnership. If it were used commercially, the technique would take carbon dioxide from smokestack emissions of power plants and pump the pollutant into a geological repository deep underground.

McPherson has studied capture and sequestration since 1997. A program of field research began in 2003, with McPherson as principal investigator, under the Energy and Geoscience Institute at the U. The project seeks to discover if sequestration can be carried out on a large scale, safely disposing of carbon dioxide emissions from major power plants.

The Southwest Regional Partnership for Carbon Sequestration is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and private backing, with many groups participating: geological surveys of Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, Arizona and Kansas, as well as the Western Governors' Association and private energy companies.

McPherson estimated that 60 or 70 researchers are working on the project, including about 20 from the University of Utah and at least 12 from Brigham Young University.

Ongoing projects are funded with about $15 million in federal money and $5 million in private funds. A new project involving large- scale sequestration, to be based near Price, has $67 million in federal funds and $21 million from private partners like ConocoPhillips and Resolute Natural Resources (based in Denver), he said.

Extracting the carbon dioxide from the plant's exhaust stream is the expensive part, according to McPherson.

In a commercial setting, carbon dioxide would be removed from power plant emissions. The experimental sequestration takes gas from underground sites and pumps it into other below-surface formations.

To capture carbon dioxide:

-- The emission stream is forced into a vat of chemicals, and the vat's conditions are changed so that the chemicals absorb carbon dioxide. Different combinations of pressure and temperature are used, depending on the chemical makeup in the vat.

-- When CO2 is absorbed by the chemicals, the mixture is moved to another vat, where the conditions are changed again so that the CO2 bubbles out of the liquid. This is pure carbon dioxide, taken out of the plant's emissions.

-- Two or more of these systems will operate simultaneously. While one is removing CO2 from the emissions, the other(s) will be separating the gas.

To sequester it:

-- Captured CO2 is piped to a compressor, where it is pressurized to 2,000 pounds or 2,500 pounds per square inch. The pressure depends on "whatever the subsurface pressure is" at the target depth, McPherson said. With that sort of pressure, the gas "becomes essentially liquefied."

-- "A pump is used to inject it down to depth." Pumping it down requires forcing it into a reservoir where pressures are "very high; again, 2,000 to 3,000 psi," he said.

The researchers have built a laboratory producing high pressure and high temperatures that can test the system, according to the university. Also, they are carrying out experiments in the field.

"We're right now in the midst of testing and research and development," McPherson said.

Smaller-scale CO2 injections are taking place near Bluff, San Juan County, and near Midland, Texas. Starting this month or next, he added, "we'll start injection in northern New Mexico in a coal field."

These experiments are to inject about 100 tons per year.

The group also is engineering a large-scale sequestration project scheduled to take place this year near Price. Pressurized gas would be injected into underground brines about 5,000 feet below the surface.

"The Price tests will be about a million tons a year," he said.

Material injected near Price will be methane taken from from coal beds. In the test, some of the gases will be captured and injected deep underground. The program should show whether capture and sequestration is efficient.

McPherson does not see safety as a big concern.

That isn't to say carbon dioxide is a benign gas. As a San Diego State University Web site records, in August 1986, "a cloudy mixture of carbon dioxide and water droplets rose violently from Lake Nyos, Cameroon (Africa). As the lethal mist swept down adjacent valleys, it killed over 1,700 people, thousands of cattle, and many more birds and animals."

Venting like that is not seen as likely in the carbon sequestration.

McPherson points out that produced water -- briny water from oil and gas wells, often containing carbon dioxide, oil and salts -- "is injected into the subsurface all the time."

Commercial sequestration may require pumping carbon dioxide to a depth of 8,000 or 10,000 feet. A formation targeted for the liquefied gas would have highly porous rock, saline groundwater that wouldn't be usable, and "thousands of feet of shale or other low- permeability rocks" over it as a cap. Salt might work, too, McPherson said.

"We've actually found that a great deal of what's called sedimentary basins, which exist in all states of the western U.S. -- those are the best places. ...

"Generally the injection would take place over a long period of time," he added. In several years, when the job of an injection well is finished, it would be capped. "Frequent, regular monitoring protocols would be indicated," he said.

New seismic imaging technology would give monitors a view of what is going on in depth.

Capture and sequestration requires energy, and the question is whether the process is economically viable.

"If you have enough money anything can be done, of course. But for specific types of power plants, the maximum estimated increase to cost of electricity would be about 20 percent," McPherson said.

That much added to a power bill may seem daunting. Although the federal government might add incentives such as tax breaks, "obviously you've added something to the system, the cost is going to go up."

The expense of capturing the gas is four times the expense of injection and storage, he said. "But that cost is going down because more and more research is going into it."

Altogether, electrical power costs eventually could rise by 10 percent because of capture and sequestration, once the system is ready, in his opinion.

Asked when the process can be carried out on a commercial scale, McPherson said, "I think it's going to be five or 10 years."

E-mail: bau@desnews.com

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