Secretary Chu Announces Up To $154 Million for NRG Energy's Carbon Capture and Storage Project ...

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://energy.gov/news/8729.htm

March 9, 2010

Secretary Chu Announces Up To $154 Million for NRG Energy's Carbon Capture and Storage Project in Texas

Funding will help demonstrate advances in clean coal efforts

Washington — U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced today that a project with NRG Energy has been selected to receive up to $154 million, including funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Located in Thompsons, TX, the post-combustion capture and sequestration project will demonstrate advanced technology to reduce emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. It will also assist with enhanced oil recovery efforts from a nearby oil field.

“Advancing our carbon capture and storage technology will create new jobs in America and reduce our carbon pollution output,” said Secretary Chu. “It’s another example of our country’s innovation at work.”

The NRG Energy project was selected under the third round of the Clean Coal Power Initiative (CCPI), a cost-shared collaboration between the federal government and private industry to demonstrate low-emission carbon capture and storage technologies in advanced coal-based, power generation. The goal of CCPI is to accelerate the readiness of advanced coal technologies for commercial deployment, ensuring that the United States has clean, reliable, and affordable electricity and power.

NRG will construct a 60 megawatt carbon capture demonstration facility at the company’s W.A. Parish Unit 7 in Thompsons, Texas. The 6-year project will demonstrate an innovative integration of several important advances in carbon capture and sequestration technologies, including-

• Fluor’s advanced Econamine FG PlusSM carbon capture process, using several different novel amine solvents.


• Ramgen’s advanced carbon dioxide compression system.


• The integration of highly efficient co-generation to provide the necessary steam and electricity.


• Enhanced oil recovery sequestration in one of the Texas Gulf Coast oilfields near the Parish plant.

The project will show that post-combustion carbon capture applied to existing plants can be done economically, especially when the plant has the opportunity to sequester carbon dioxide in nearby oilfields.

The U.S. Department of Energy will provide up to $154 million in federal funds, which will be matched by NRG Energy.

Media contact(s):
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[unhappycamper]

1. Clean coal is an oxymoron much the same as

Military Intelligence.

[Statistical]

3. CCS could be used for natural gas turbines.

Even in a 90% non fossil fuel environment some natural gas turbines will likely be used.

They can operate at very low or very high load. They can rapidly ramp up and down product. This makes them the best balancing power source. On the electrical grid supply and demand loads must balance. Too much imbalance will damage both power plants and consumer equipment.

So if we accept some natural gas will be used why not make it as emission free as possible.
I support CCS research but I think CCS research for coal is a dead end.

Even if coal has 0.0g of CO per kWh it is still horribly filthy in non carbon ways (mercury, arsenic, heavy metals, radioactive isotopes, etc).

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. So... let me see if I'm following you

There's much more to worry about in coal exhaust than just CO₂, so we shouldn't attempt to capture the CO₂ either?

Fully half of US electrical generation today is powered by coal burners. Whether we try to replace them with nuclear plants, or wind turbines, or solar panels, or any other technology you'd care to imagine, we cannot accomplish it overnight.

So, what do we do in the meantime?

"Clean coal" may be an oxymoron, but I'd sure like to see some "cleaner coal."

[Statistical]

5. The danger is in the unintended consequences.

CCS may result in coal never going away. Any technology that prolongs the length of coal will kill people.

Even "cleaner coal" is an oxymoron as this technology reduces carbon footprint of coal but make no mistakes coal is still lethal.
A better term would be "carbon lite" coal.

I might be a cynic but this is what I think CCS will do. It will vastly overpromise and under deliver. The real world will be fairly ineffective. When CCS equipment is down will legislation require coal plant to go offline? I doubt it. So the utilities will have an incentive for CCS equipment to break because it reduces the cost of coal power. I Think it might break a lot. More CO2 will leak from caverns than is estimated reducing effectiveness. The amount of carbon captured from stack will be lower yield than promising lab results. All put together even w/ CCS in the real world coal might emit more CO2 than high efficiency natural gas turbines and we get all the health hazards as a "bonus". Maybe I am just overly cynical and I would love to be proven wrong. I think Coal w/ CCS is just "feel good" do nothing technology. It will also give coal a cover. "See we are green coal".

A tax on carbon would rather quickly shift power away from coal to natural gas turbines. While both emit CO2 natural gas emits about half the CO2 per ton. At $30 per ton and current fuel prices dual cycle natural gas turbines will have cheaper marginal cost compared to coal. While coal plants won't go away they will trade capacity factor with natural gas. Rather than coal plants running at 70% capacity and natural gas at 40% you will see the reverse. Net result in less CO2 and less toxins while we slowly unwind fossil fuel industry.

[OKIsItJustMe]

6. "Cleaner coal" is not an oxymoron

Coal with no scrubbers is horribly dirty. Lakes in NY were being decimated by acid rain from coal plants in the Mid-West.

Thanks to "Cap & Trade" that situation has been improved tremendously. That, right there, is cleaner coal. It's not clean room coal, but it's cleaner.

http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=1085

[hunter]

2. Maybe he wants to shut them up.

Or maybe he wants to keep the fantasy of clean coal alive.

I predict it will be absurdly expensive.

[OKIsItJustMe]

7. Smokestash Industry: ARPA-E Seeks Breakthroughs in Carbon Capture Technology

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=smokestash-industry-arpa-e-seeks-carbon-capture-breakthroughs

March 9, 2010 | 4 comments

Smokestash Industry: ARPA-E Seeks Breakthroughs in Carbon Capture Technology

Humans can capture and release CO2 efficiently, so why can't power plants?

By David Biello

...

Research engineer Harry Cordatos and his colleagues at United Technologies Corp. (UTC) are working on just such a system—and have garnered funding from the U.S. Department of Energy's new ARPA-E program. After all, UTC subsidiary Hamilton Sundstrand has been making CO2 capture units for the space program since the 1960s with different technology. But carbonic anhydrase "captures 600 molecules every second," Cordatos said at the ARPA-E summit in Washington, D.C., last week. "To take this enzyme out of the body is challenging. Our bodies continuously regenerate the enzyme because it degrades."

So Cordatos and UTC's idea is not to use the enzyme itself, but to master its chemistry and "use it in the unnatural environment of power plant flue gas," Cordatos said. The key appears to be a single zinc atom that sits at the core of the enzyme, which resembles a pyramid in structure. That structure allows the carbonic anhydrase to grip the CO2 "not too loose and not too tight," Cordatos explained, which is critical for efficiently capturing and then releasing the greenhouse gas.

UTC is not alone in this pursuit. In the ARPA-E program alone, four of the 37 funded developing technologies concerned researching more energy-efficient ways to capture the CO2 in a fossil fuel–fired power plant's flue gas. Chemist David Moore at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., employs electricity itself to charge absorbent materials for CO2 capture. Nalco Co., is developing an "electrochemical platform" to do the job. And physicist Olgica Bakajin of Hayward, Calif.–based Porifera, Inc., plans to use membranes composed of carbon nanotubes to separate CO2 from the other gases—using carbon to capture carbon.

"We need to develop the technologies that enable us to use our fossil fuels in a clean way," Secretary of Energy Steven Chu told ScientificAmerican.com at the conference. "This is something you don't solve in five years, 10 years. It will take a half century to get our carbon emissions down to where we need to go to protect the climate." At the same time, the U.S. will require a steady supply of electricity which, today, means coal burning or nuclear power, Chu said.

...