Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
7/25/2014
Construction began this week on a 2 megawatt carbon capture pilot project at Kentucky Utilities’ E.W. Brown Generation Station in Harrodsburg, Ky. The post-combustion system being tested at the plant was developed by the University of Kentucky’s Center for Applied Energy Research (UKCAER) and will be managed by the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). Funding for the project, which has a total price tag of $19.5 million, comes in part from DOE, which will contribute $14.5 million for the project. Additional funding comes from Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems America, the University of Kentucky, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), the Kentucky Department of Energy Development and Independence and the Carbon Management Research Group.
The pilot will demonstrate several unique concepts, Kunlei Liu, Associate Director for Research at UKCAER, told GHG Monitor. “The technologies are very different from what other people are using,” he said. The project utilizes a two-stage stripping process that, according to an NETL release this week, “increases solvent working capacity, reduces the energy required for solvent regeneration, and reduces capital costs.” Also to be demonstrated is an advanced solvent system that will lower the heat of regeneration, has a higher capacity and lower solvent degradation rates than a conventional amine solvent. Plant efficiency will be improved through an integrated cooling tower that “recovers energy from the carbon-capture system.”
UKCEAR Signs MOU with Sinopec
Earlier this month, UKCAER entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with Chinese company Sinopec. UKCEAR has been exchanging information with Sinopec for several years, Liu explained. The University and Sinopec were selected to take part in an effort to bring further cooperation between the two countries by the U.S.-China Climate Change Working Group. “China has worked on carbon dioxide for 10-to-15 years. They’ve worked on different applications and this particular project is using captured CO2 for enhanced oil recovery. We have had the information exchange with them since 2011 so when the climate change working group was looking for projects between the U.S. and China, whether we can work together to battle CO2 emissions, that’s the project we proposed and it was accepted by China and endorsed by the U.S. DOE,” Liu said.
According to a University of Kentucky news release, the project will develop technologies to capture flue gas from the Shengli power plant’s 600 MW unit using chemical absorption, compression and dehydration of the CO2 which will then be transported to and injected into the Shengli Oilfield for storage. In phase two of the project, captured CO2 will be used for EOR.
