Carbon capture has been slow to fulfill the hopes held for it by a wide range of powerful energy policy players – from the Natural Resources Defense Council to the International Energy Agency – who see the technology as crucial in the fight against global warming.
But its prospects in the United States got a boost on Tuesday when NRG Energy and JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration announced they had partnered to build the Petra Nova Carbon Capture Project, about 25 miles southwest of downtown Houston. They said that work had begun.
With the $1 billion project, the companies plan to capture 90 percent of the carbon dioxide in a portion of the flue gas emerging from a 610-megawatt coal-fired unit at the NRG-owned W.A. Parish Electric Generating Station, send the CO2 82 miles down the road via pipeline to a flagging oilfield, and inject the CO2 underground to free up “stranded” oil.
The term for this sort of scheme is “post-combustion carbon-capture enhanced oil recovery.” If it works as planned, it will deliver “clean” electricity from the coal plant and no small sum of domestically produced oil – and the carbon will ultimately be sequestered beneath the surface of the earth.
This is a project that’s been kicking around for a while in one form or another – in 2010, it won a $167 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy through the Clean Coal Power Initiative (and with help from the Recovery Act). When NRG announced the DOE grant in 2010, it said the demonstration project was “scheduled to begin operating in 2013.”
Presumably, with a new 50-50 partner, financing in place, and work actually under way, the revised operational target date of “the end of 2016” is a bit more solid than the old one was.
The Obama administration, criticized in some quarters as waging a “war on coal,” cheered the announcement. “With coal expected to remain a significant part of the energy portfolio in the U.S. and internationally, first-of-a-kind projects like Petra Nova will move us towards a low-carbon energy future,” Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said in a statement.
The International Energy Agency has been expecting CCS to contribute 7 gigatons out of 42 gigatons in CO2 reductions under a scenario for keeping the global average temperature from rising more than 2°C, considered crucial to avoiding climate disaster. But just last fall the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, while noting that four projects had come online the previous year, said “momentum was too slow if CCS was to play its full part in tackling climate change at lowest cost.”
The problem: the massive cost of deploying a technology that, while conceptually accepted, remains largely in a “demonstration” phase. But with the Obama administration pursuing new restrictions on coal-plant emissions, carbon capture could be gaining traction.
Putting the CO2 to work to boost oil production – not a new technique in and of itself – is being counted on to help make the technology more economically viable; with the Petra Nova project, production at West Ranch, near Vanderbilt, Texas, a working oilfield since 1938, is expected to go from 500 barrels a day to 15,000.
In a fact sheet on the project [PDF], the National Energy Technology Laboratory points to another hopeful aspect of Petra Nova: While capture and compression of CO2 can be a big (and thus expensive) power consumer itself, a cogeneration plant at the Texas project is “anticipated to reduce carbon capture costs and increase system flexibility and efficiency.”
The process that will be used to scrub carbon from the coal plant’s emissions is the same one that was used at a DOE-backed pilot project in Alabama. With it, the DOE said, “coal-fired power generation would have a greenhouse gas footprint much lower than that of a traditional natural gas power plant.”
