Karen Frantz
GHG Monitor
1/10/14
The Department of Energy will provide more than $250 million in cost-shared funding to Leucadia Energy, LLC for its planned petroleum coke-to-chemicals gasification plant in Louisiana that would be outfitted with carbon capture and storage technology, according to a notice published in the Federal Register late this week. The $261 million cost-share grant will go to the CCS portion of the project—making up about 60 percent of the project’s estimated $435.6 million total development cost and capital cost—and the money will come from DOE’s stimulus-funded Industrial Carbon Capture Sequestration (ICCS) Program. The Lake Charles project is one of three large-scale industrial capture demonstration projects being funding with $700 million in stimulus dollars from the ICCS program.
Explaining its decision, DOE said in the notice, “The proposed project would help DOE meet its congressionally mandated mission of supporting demonstration of the next generation of technologies that capture CO2 from industrial sources for sequestration or beneficial use. The proposed action would also generate technical, environmental and financial data regarding the design, construction and operation of a CO2 capture facility, pipeline and monitoring facilities. The data would contribute to DOE’s evaluation of the effective and economic implementation of these technologies at a commercial scale.”
The Leucadia Energy project will capture 4.6 million tonnes of CO2 per year from a new-build pet coke gasification facility near the Port of Lake Charles, La. That carbon would then be transported to Denbury Resource’s pre-existing Green Pipeline, which would carry the CO2 to the company’s Hastings oil field south of Houston for enhanced oil recovery operations. That depleted field is currently storing CO2 being captured from two steam methane reformers at Air Products and Chemicals’ DOE-funded hydrogen production-capture facility in Port Arthur, Texas.