Burying Climate Change: Efforts Begin to Sequester Carbon Dioxide from Power Plant

Over the next five years at least half a million tons of carbon dioxide will be injected into rock deep underneath the Mountaineer power plant near New Haven, W.Va. Although that is less than 0.00001 percent of global emissions of the greenhouse gas and less than 2 percent of the plant’s own CO₂ output, the sequestration, which begins this week, marks the first commercial demonstration of the only available technological fix for the carbon problem of coal-fired power plants, one that many coal facilities around the world hope to emulate.

Coal accounts for roughly 50 percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. and as much as 75 percent of the electricity generated by American Electric Power, says Nick Akins, executive vice president of generation at the utility, which owns Mountaineer. The plant can pump out 1,300 megawatts of electricity, making it one of the single largest coal-fired power plants in the U.S. and a leading source of CO₂ emissions. (The top emitters of global warming pollution—China and the U.S.—burn nearly four billion tons of the dirty black rock a year.)

As a result, everyone from coal companies to environmental groups have identified carbon capture and storage, or CCS, as critical in enabling significant and rapid cuts in greenhouse gases. But there have been only a handful of demonstrations of the technology to capture the gas and, outside of using CO₂ to pump more oil out of the ground, even fewer attempts to store it.

To capture CO₂ from its smokestacks, Mountaineer will employ so-called chilled ammonia technology, which relies on ammonium carbonate chemistry to pull CO₂ out of the exhaust gases. (The other two basic capture technologies either burn coal in pure oxygen to produce a CO₂-rich emissions stream or siphon off the CO₂ made during the gasification of coal.) Mountaineer takes the captured CO2 and compresses it to at least 2,000 pounds per square inch, liquefying it and pumping it roughly 8,000 feet down into the ground. That deep, the liquid CO₂ flows through the porous rock formations, adhering to the tiny spaces, slowly spreading out over time and, ultimately, chemically reacting with rock or brine. “We’re not going into a salt cavern; we’re not going into an underground river. We’re going into microscopic holes,” explains geologist Susan Hovorka of the University of Texas at Austin, referring to CCS in general. “Add it up, and it’s a large volume.”

In fact, the Department of Energy estimates that the U.S. has the geologic room for 3.9 trillion tons of CO₂ underground, more than enough for the 3.2 billion tons emitted every year by large industrial sources.

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Tags: American Electric Power, Carbon capture and storage, department of energy, environment, Fossil-fuel power plant, global warming, greenhouse gas, University of Texas at Austin

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 7:04 pm and is filed under Innovation Needed, Need to Know, Project Energy, Scientific American, environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.