NRG Energy / Powerspan 125MW CCS Demonstration Plant in Texas
US power station operator NRG Energy and technology company Powerspan have announced plans to develop a “commercial scale” carbon capture and sequestration facility for a coal power station.It will be attached to a power plant in WA Parish, Sugar Land, Texas, which NRG says is one of the largest and best baseload coal facilities in the country.
It will use Powerspan’s ECO2 technology, which captures carbon dioxide post combustion into an ammonia stream. Powergen says that the system has simpler capital equipment design and lower energy consumption than other carbon capture technologies.
NRG says that carbon capture projects on coal fuelled power plants have only been conducted to date at a scale of 1 to 5 megawatts; this one will capture carbon dioxide from flue gas equivalent to what a 125 megawatt power plant would emit.
It will rank “among the world’s largest CCS projects and potentially the first to achieve commercial scale capture and sequestration from an existing coal-fueled power plant,” NRG says.The carbon dioxide is expected to be used to enhanced oilfield recovery (EOR) in Houston, being buried in oilfields to push more oil out of the ground.
The plant is expected to capture 90 per cent of carbon dioxide from the flue gas stream and be operational in 2012.
Scheduled to begin operating in 2013, NRG’s carbon capture demonstration project at WA Parish
will be among the first of its kind. It will use Fluor Corporation’s (NYSE: FLR) advanced
Econamine FG Plussm technology to process flue gas from the plant equal in quantity to that of a
60 megawatt unit. It will be designed to capture 90% of incoming CO2, or approximately 400,000
metric tons of CO2 annually—a level that can further advance the technology’s viability on a larger
scale. Once captured, the CO2 will be compressed and used in enhanced oilfield recovery operations.
Carbon capture technology is part of NRG’s clean energy portfolio that includes nuclear, onshore
wind, offshore wind and solar that will help the Company meet future energy production and
environmental sustainability goals.
NRG Energy, Inc. (NYSE: NRG) has been selected by
the United States Department of Energy (DOE) to receive up to $154 million, including funding
from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, to build a post-combustion carbon capture
demonstration unit at NRG’s WA Parish plant southwest of Houston. The proposed project was
submitted under the Clean Coal Power Initiative Program (CCPI), a cost-shared collaboration
between the federal government and private industry to demonstrate low-emission carbon capture
and storage technologies in advanced coal-based, power generation. The goal of CCPI is to
accelerate the readiness of advanced coal technologies for commercial deployment, ensuring that the
United States has clean, reliable, and affordable electricity and power.