Three carbon capture and storage projects in the United States are on schedule to come online in the next few months, Andrew Hlasko, senior project manager at the U.S. Department of Energy, said Thursday during a presentation at a Washington, D.C., technology showcase hosted by the Coal Utilization Research Center.
The three projects – the Kemper County Energy Facility in Mississippi, the Petra Nova project in Texas, and the Archer Daniels Midland Illinois Industrial CCS Project – reflect a wide variety of technology types.
Once completed, the Petra Nova project will the world’s largest post-combustion CCS project on a coal-fired power plant. “It will be permanently sequestering 1.4 million metric tons of CO2 per year, and it will do so as part of enhanced oil recovery,” Hlasko said.
The carbon capture technology from the Petra Nova project, a high-performance solvent developed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Kansai Electric Power, offers a strong commercialization potential, he added: “It demonstrates CCS technology that is directly applicable to existing power plants, and if you consider that around 35 percent of power generation in the United States is coal-fired, this presents significant opportunity for application of this technology.”
The project is 99 percent completed, according to Hlasko, and is expected to reach full operation in January 2017. “Very importantly, this project is within budget, and it remains on schedule,” Hlasko said. The project cost is $1 billion.
That’s far more than can be said for the Kemper County Energy Project. The project is currently priced at $6.8 billion, nearly three times its original $2.4 billion cost estimate. It would have begun full operation in May 2014 under its original timeline, but is now expected to reach that milestone by Oct. 31.
The project, a new-build, post-combustion CCS facility near the city of Meridian, has been producing energy with natural gas for two years. Once fully operational, the plant will use Mississippi lignite, a low-rank brown coal, to produce electricity. It will employ a custom integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) system and CCS technology to produce carbon emissions roughly equal to that of natural gas. The CCS and IGCC portions of the plant are not yet online, though project developer Mississippi Power recently announced the successful production of syngas from both gasifiers.
The final project, Archer Daniels Midland’s industrial CCC project in Illinois, captures CO2 for storage from an ethanol plant in the city of Decatur. CO2 injection is expected this year following authorization from the Environmental Protection Agency.