Power plants challenged by carbon capture and storage

Oct 05 - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (PA)

 

The Obama administration's push to cut greenhouse gas pollution from power plants by nearly a third over the next 15 years has the energy industry taking another look at carbon capture and storage techniques.

Known as CCS, the process of taking carbon dioxide from plant emissions and injecting it underground has not been used on a large commercial scale in the United States , partly because of high projected costs. Utah -based Sustainable Energy Solutions, though, thinks its Cryogenic Carbon Capture technology, which freezes the pollutant for storage, could make CCS installation more feasible for power plants.

"We think we can be at construction at a commercial scale in five years and operating a commercial system in seven," said Larry Baxter , co-founder and technical director of Sustainable Energy Solutions. He outlined his company's technology last month during a conference in Downtown Pittsburgh .

The Department of Energy and power companies such as NRG Energy also are exploring carbon capture. Companies that avoided the technology in years past because of its high cost might see it as an alternative to closing plants to reduce overall emissions.

Federal carbon rules "will likely be a factor in the use of CCS for power plants as CCS is one of the approaches that may be used to comply with the Clean Power Plan," said Lynn Brickett , carbon capture technology manager at the Energy Department's South Park-based National Energy Technology Laboratory .

The lab last week issued a report showing prospective storage space in salt mines, oil and gas wells, and unminable coal seams increased by more than 9 percent since 2012.

Use of capture technologies could remove about 90 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions produced by fossil fuel use at power plants and other industrial processes, according to the Carbon Capture & Storage Association in London .

The most commonly studied process, called post-combustion CCS, involves using a liquid to absorb carbon dioxide in the emission stream to separate it from other gases, but then the absorbent has to be heated to release the carbon dioxide, said Mark Northam , director of the University of Wyoming School of Energy Resources .

"The technology developed by Sustainable Energy Solutions ... promises to be much more energy-efficient and perhaps less costly to build. Both of those still need to be demonstrated," Northam said.

The cryogenic process freezes out the carbon dioxide, which is then pressurized, melted and delivered at pipeline pressure for underground storage.

It would cost $250 million to $300 million to buy and implement Cryogenic Carbon Capture for a large-scale, 500-megawatt plant, said Baxter, a chemical engineering professor at Brigham Young University . He predicts that would cost customers an extra 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour, less than half of the cost of other types of CCS.

The Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency , Canadian and European groups, and other agencies have invested about $21 million in Cryogenic Carbon Capture research and development, Baxter said. That includes $12.4 million in grants from Wyoming's Clean Coal Technology Fund to Sustainable Energy Solutions.

The company is sending a smaller-scale cryogenic facility on tractor-trailers for field tests at several sites across the country. The biggest challenge for Sustainable Energy Solutions is raising the $23 million to build a mobile facility that will process 100 times as much gas as its pilot equipment, Baxter said.

"It will be most likely that the first implementation will be in a power plant, most likely a coal-fired power plant or potentially a cement plant," Northam said.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy found the company's test results "excellent," said program director James Klausner .

"While preliminary analysis suggests that there is a cost benefit of the cryogenic capture technology compared with more conventional (carbon) capture, more testing and demonstration of the technology at a larger scale will be needed to validate the preliminary analysis," he said.

Princeton, N.J. -based NRG, which operates the Homer City Generating Station in Indiana County , is building a commercial-scale CCS system at its WA Parish power plant in Fort Bend County, Texas , spokesman David Knox said. The $1 billion project is expected to be the world's largest post-combustion carbon capture facility installed on a coal plant when it is finished in 2016, he said.

There is value in the captured carbon dioxide because NRG will inject it into wells at West Ranch oil field to increase oil production, a process called enhanced oil recovery.

"We expect to increase production from that oil field from about 500 barrels a day ... to 15,000 barrels a day. And that is taking carbon dioxide and turning it into a valuable revenue stream," Knox said.

The cost of CCS needs to come down before companies will look at using it at plants such as the Homer City facility, Knox said.

Tory N. Parrish is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. She can be reached at 412-380-5662 or tparrish@tribweb.com .

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