May 12 - The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review



Pennsylvania has the underground storage capacity to hold more than 300 years' worth of carbon dioxide extracted from coal-fired power plants in the state at a cost competitive with carbon storage systems worldwide, a state official said Tuesday.

The state's problem in developing what's known as carbon capture and sequestration on a commercial scale, which proponents say could create jobs, is that no single land owner controls a sufficient geographic area to move a project forward.

"We want to get carbon capture and sequestration on a commercial scale moving -- in the next five years," said John Quigley, secretary of the state's Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. He spoke to 600 attendees at the Ninth Annual Carbon Capture & Sequestration Conference in the Pittsburgh Hilton Hotel.

Carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is viewed by experts as a major contributor to global warming. Some analyses project that without a major push on advanced carbon capture and storage technology, power prices by 2030 will jump 65 percent and cost the economy as much as $1.5 trillion.

 Pennsylvania's Act 129, signed into law in 2008, mandated the assessment of geologic formations for carbon dioxide storage. The state and Department of Conservation and Natural Resources partnered with the Clinton Climate Initiative to look at the viability of a large-scale carbon capture and storage network in the state.

The Clinton Initiative in Boston was started to create solutions to issues driving climate change, such as greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide.

A Clinton study looked at retrofitting six coal-fired power plants with carbon capture equipment, which would be connected by centralized pipelines to a storage area. The cost to capture carbon dioxide and compress the emissions from the plants was $6.9 billion, and to transport and store the carbon dioxide was another $1.2 billion, the study found.

"We found that the capture, transport and storage of carbon dioxide, plus annual operating expenses to store the carbon dioxide, would cost about $73 a ton of carbon dioxide," comparable with any existing or proposed system in the world, Quigley said.

Benefits of moving quickly to adopt carbon storage and sequestration technology include avoiding liabilities that a coal-dependent state like Pennsylvania would face when new carbon regulations are introduced, potentially reducing the cost of electricity and making power more attractive for export.

A large-scale carbon capture and storage system would help retain jobs related to coal mining and coal-fired power generation, while creating an unspecified number of new jobs and exportable technologies, the Clinton Initiative said.

Pennsylvania's problem is land control, according to Quigley.

Department of Energy criteria state that 100 square miles of underground land area would be needed in order

to capture 90 percent of carbon emissions from a 500-megawatt coal-fired power plant for 40 years and pump the captured carbon dioxode into an underground space 300 feet thick.

A 500-megawatt coal-fired plant is not a large facility. FirstEnergy Corp.'s Bruce Mansfield Power Station in Shippingport, Beaver County, has a generating capacity of more than 2,700 megawatts. One megawatt powers about 800 homes.

"We looked at both public and private lands statewide, and none we looked at had 100 square miles of property under a single owner," Quigley said. "The state owns sufficient state forest land, but the underground space only is 30 feet thick."

Quigley suggests that to make commercial-scale carbon capture and sequestration viable, the federal government may have to step in, perhaps taking over deep salt aquifers for carbon storage.

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