August 04, 2010
The pursuit of carbon capture and sequestration technologies is a national priority. As such, the U.S. Department of Energy will award $67 million over three years to those projects that are developing the relevant tools.
While the Obama administration is best known for its stimulus funds aimed at producing more green technologies, it has also begun emphasizing carbon capture and sequestration. The White House has set a goal of bringing 5 to 10 demonstration projects on line by 2016 -- an endeavor that would focus for now on coal, which provides half of the nation's electric generation mix.
"Charting a path toward clean coal is essential to achieving our goals of providing clean energy, creating American jobs, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions," says Secretary Steven Chu, in a statement announcing the awards. "It will also help position the United States as a leader in the global clean energy race."
Power companies contribute a third of all carbon emissions in the United States, according to the Congressional Research Service. Older coal-fired facilities could be retrofitted so as to trap the carbon before it leaves the smokestack. But such remedies are expensive and less efficient than building modern coal plants called integrated gasification combined cycle generators, commonly referred to as coal gasification.
Such plants scrub the mercury, nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide before they would separate the remaining byproducts: carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which could be used to power everything from cars to power plants. The largest demonstration projects are in Norway, where Statoil is placing 1 million tons of carbon per year into a saline aquifer deep in the North Sea, and in Canada, where the carbon is going into the Weyburn oil field just north of the North Dakota border.
Carbon, generally, can be captured three ways: Pre-combustion, which separates the carbon from the coal before it is burned; post-combustion, which parses the carbon from a flue gas after it is burned and oxy-coal combustion, which generates electricity in an oxygen-rich environment. The awards given by the Energy Department are for post-combustion technologies using membranes and solvents.
Among the awards: American Air Liquide and the Gas Technology Institute are recipients that use the membrane technology. Siemens Energy, meanwhile, will design, install and operate a pilot project at a TECO facility using solvents. And, Akermin, which says that it can capture 90 percent of carbon from flue gases using a solvent.
Mature Fuel
To be sure, critics of these government expenditures say that the money would be better spent on promoting renewable energy. They are also saying that the coal sector does not need any more subsidies and that it is a mature fuel that has run its course.
While green groups are skeptical of coal, many are nonetheless resigned to the fact that it will play an integral role for some time. Fossil fuels, in fact, comprise 80 percent of the global energy mix. Therefore, many of those approach the topic by saying that if coal plants are built, they should be equipped with the latest and greatest technologies.
To that end, they want the U.S. Senate to join the House to pass energy legislation that caps carbon emission levels. Doing so would force utilities to either adopt the best-available technologies or to switch to fuel sources that are less carbon-intensive. Despite the impediments, green groups want a bill passed by summer's end.
"With record heat waves becoming more common, ice caps melting and oil gushing into the Gulf, the Senate must pass a bill that has real pollution limits and will break our addiction to oil," says Dan Lashof, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's climate center. "Another `junk shot' energy bill with meaningless goals and toothless provisions may fool some of the people some of the time, but won't fool Mother Nature." American Electric Power, which relies on coal to fuel 66 percent of its generation, says that it is committed to reducing its carbon footprint. It is now developing the only plant in the country that would both capture and store the carbon with post-combustion technologies. It is using chilled ammonia to capture up to 90 percent of the carbon.
AEP's Mountaineer project in West Virginia may be a turning point. The best scenario for it would be if the technology works as advertised and it could be scaled up from 20 megawatts to the next level of 200 megawatts. The worst situation would be that the saline aquifer won't hold the injected carbon while the chilled ammonia would not perform up to snuff, requiring too much of the unit's energy to trap the carbon.
AEP's facility is patterned after one by Wisconsin-based We Energies, which is piloting a 1.7-megawatt project that is only trying to capture the carbon. Meantime, ConocoPhillips, General Electric and Shell Corp. are spending billions to develop not just coal gasification technologies but also the tools to bury carbon.
"We have seen over time that lab initiatives work well in a controlled environment," says Bill Sigmon, senior vice president of Engineering, Projects and Field Services for AEP, in a prior talk with this writer. "But as you upgrade to commercial scale, it may not work as advertised. We need to go in steps to give surety. If we can get to the 200-megawatt range, then it will give us the surety we need to say that we can count on it."
By most accounts, energy usage will rise in the coming decades and coal will remain the primary fuel source to generate electricity. Carbon sequestration therefore holds the key to future power plant production using fossil fuels.
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