Nov 3 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - George Hohmann Charleston Daily Mail, W.Va.


The British government is already convinced that carbon capture and storage, also known as CCS, will keep coal in the energy mix for decades to come.

Dominick Chilcott, deputy head of the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., attended the commissioning of a CCS project at American Electric Power's Mountaineer Plant on Friday "because we see CCS as absolutely crucial to the future."

The project here captures carbon dioxide from a 20-megawatt electric slipstream of the plant's flue gas. A chilled ammonia process patented by Alstom, a global engineering company headquartered in France, is used to liquefy the carbon dioxide, which is then pumped underground for long-term storage.

This project will help validate the effectiveness of Alstom's chilled ammonia process and the viability of storing the liquefied gas underground. The project will operate for up to five years.

Chilcott said the British government recognizes that energy and climate change are important topics that must be addressed. "We're very realistic about this," he said. "We recognize we need to deal with man-made climate change as a phenomenon, but in a way that doesn't bankrupt our economy and provides energy security.

"Coal is really important to all of our economies," he said. "Thirty-three percent of our electricity is generated from coal, 40 percent is from natural gas, 20 percent from nuclear and about 5 percent from renewables. We expect renewables to increase. We think gas has probably peaked because the North Sea gas field is being used up. We have vast reserves of coal in the United Kingdom. We believe coal is going to continue to be an important part of how we generate electricity in the U.K.

"For every single unit of energy produced from coal, we produce about twice the volume of carbon dioxide as the same unit produced with natural gas," Chilcott said. "If we're serious about reducing carbon dioxide emissions -- and we believe we have to be serious -- we have to find a way to keep using coal and at the same time reduce emissions."

Chilcott said he traveled to New Haven "to demonstrate the British government's support for what's going on in West Virginia and for what Alstom is doing." He called the CCS demonstration project here "an innovative use of technology" that promises "a safer, more secure future for all of us on the planet -- and West Virginia is showing the way."

He said the British government has adopted a two-part policy:

--Any new 300-megawatt or larger coal-fired power plant built in England and Wales must have the ability to be fitted with CCS technology.

--Within five years of the technology being proven on a commercial scale, any plant built since April 2009 must be retrofitted with CCS technology.

The British aren't waiting for someone else to prove that CCS works. Chilcott said two companies in Scotland are currently operating small CCS projects and the British government is sponsoring a competition that will lead to the construction of as many as four commercial-scale CCS plants.

"We're very determined to do this," he said.

Suitable geologic formations are required in order to safely store carbon dioxide underground. Here, liquefied carbon dioxide is being stored in a sandstone formation 7,800 feet below the surface and in a dolomite formation about 8,200 feet below the surface.

In the United Kingdom, "We expect the storage part of CCS to take place under the North Sea, where all of the drilling we've done shows that there's a lot of reservoir capacity," Chilcott said.

Underground coal mining in the United Kingdom "went out of fashion a bit," in part because it was so expensive, Chilcott said. The U.K. currently imports a lot of coal from producers as far away as Australia.

"If CCS leads, as it may do, to people looking at coal in a new way, saying they can make more use of coal without worrying about emissions so much, there will be a huge market for West Virginia," Chilcott said. "We'll be looking to buy."

Chilcott's trip to West Virginia included a meeting with Gov. Joe Manchin.

A career diplomat, Chilcott has been deputy head of mission at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., since January 2008. His career has included assignments in Turkey, Portugal, London and Brussels. Prior to his appointment to Washington, he was British High Commissioner to Sri Lanka and the Maldives.

Chilcott writes a blog, which is posted on the Internet at blogs.fco.gov.uk/roller/chilcott/

The Mountaineer Plant has a single generating unit that produces 1,300 megawatts of electricity. In August AEP asked for $334 million in federal stimulus money to pay about half of the cost to scale the Mountaineer Plant project up to a 235-megawatt electric slipstream of flue gas. That request is pending.

Alstom has targeted its chilled ammonia process for commercial operation by 2015. Alstom is simultaneously pursuing two other carbon-capture technologies. One uses amines, a class of chemicals derived from ammonia, to isolate carbon dioxide from coal-fueled boiler emissions. A pilot project using this process began operating at The Dow Chemical Co.'s South Charleston plant in September. Alstom is also working on an oxy-fired combustion process.

Contact writer George Hohmann at business@dailymail.com or 304-348-4836.

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