Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
6/5/2015
With Mitsubishi Heavy Industries having scaled up its carbon capture technology to commercial scale for NRG Energy’s Petra Nova WA Parish project outside of Houston, Texas, the project manager for the Petra Nova effort said this week that if the project is a success, it may serve to quiet arguments that carbon capture and storage is not commercially viable. “EPA wants to regulate, and the utilities are coming back saying it’s not commercial,” project manager Dale Wilterdink said this week at an event hosted by the United States Energy Association. “It’s one reason for the WA project that the [Department of Energy] has added some funding to the project because they very much want to keep a hand in and be very much aware of what’s going on. As part of that funding they’re getting a lot of data information from our project and I think that that’s being fed back to the EPA and is trying to provide the data to say [it’s commercial].”
The Petra Nova project, which broke ground in September 2014, will capture approximately 1.6 million tons of CO2 annually from an approximately 240 megawatt (MW) slipstream of flue gas from W.A. Parish Unit 8. This equates to a 90 percent capture rate. The project stands to be the world’s largest post-combustion carbon capture facility installed on an existing coal plant. The CO2 captured will be transported roughly 80 miles via pipeline 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.
Construction continues at the project with no indication of delays. “We’re scheduled to start probably running flue gas through in October and be commercial in December of next year,” Wilterdink said. “Right now engineering is about 90 percent complete and construction is a little over 15 percent complete on the project so there’s a lot going on out there.”
