Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
7/18/2014
NRG Energy and partner JX Nippon Oil Exploration announced this week that construction has begun at the Petra Nova Carbon Capture Project, which upon completion will be the world’s largest post-combustion carbon capture project. The project is due to be operational by the end of 2016, NRG spokesman David Knox told GHG Monitor. “It will be actually a little bit before you see things being installed at the site,” Knox said. “What we’ve done is we’ve given the final notice to proceed to the contracting team of [Mitsubishi Heavy Industries] and [The Industrial Company (TIC)] and they are now lining up the workforce and the supplies needed to get started.” Work at the site is due to begin in September following the demolition of a warehouse located where the carbon capture system is to be installed.
Located at the WA Parish power plant near Houston, Texas, the project will capture approximately 1.6 million tons of CO2 annually from an approximately 240 megawatt (MW) slipstream of flue gas from WA Parish Unit 8, according to an NRG release. This equates to a 90 percent capture rate. The CO2 will then be transported to the West Ranch oil field, which NRG has purchased a stake in. There it is expected that the CO2 which will be used for enhanced oil recovery will enable the procurement of approximately 60 million barrels of oil, the release says.
Project Can Serve as ‘Bridge’ for Power, Oil Industries, Exec.Says
The project is unique in the business model it has developed to handle EOR, Knox said. “We’re not selling CO2. The return on selling CO2 is so small it would not really make the economics of the project work, so what we have done is we have actually gone to Hilcorp and bought a 50 percent interest in the West Ranch oil field and we will be making the revenue stream based off the oil sales, not the CO2,” he said. This is an important step in the commercialization of CCS, Arun Banskota, president of NRG’s carbon capture group, told GHG Monitor. “It’s an extremely rewarding project because we truly believe that this is a game changer in the industry because it really acts as bridge between the power and the oil industries because in the power industry carbon dioxide is something that is surplus and something that you need to manage and NRG is doing a pretty active job on that. In the oil industry [CO2] is in huge shortage so this project really acts like a bridge between both those two huge industries,” Banskota said.
Funding for the project comes, in part, from a Department of Energy grant of $167 million, awarded through the Clean Coal Power Initiative Program in 2010. The total cost of the project is estimated at a approximately $1 billion. “The DOE funding was a very important catalyst,” Banskota said. “It is less than 20 percent of the overall source of project, but the most important role that that grant played was as a catalyst to get the entire project going so we are definitely very grateful to the DOE for selecting us for this competitive award and for seeing this project through.”
