Saturday, December 05, 2009
AEP gets grant to test carbon capture
The company will use the federal funds to build a larger emissions control system.
Jeanna Duerscherl | The Roanoke Times
The Mountaineer plant in New Haven, W.Va., will test AEP's new carbon capture and storage technology.
The latest from The Ticker blog
The nation's taxpayers will foot roughly half the bill for American Electric Power and investment partners when the electric utility beefs up a small carbon dioxide capture and storage demonstration project recently launched at one of the company's coal-fired power plants.
On Friday, the U.S. Department of Energy allocated $334 million to AEP to help it design, construct and operate a much-heftier version of a patented chilled ammonia capture and storage project brought online at a very small scale in September at the Mountaineer power plant in New Haven, W.Va.
AEP received the full amount for which it had applied and said the $334 million represents "about half the estimated cost of the system."
Both DOE and AEP noted that new energy technologies can create clean energy jobs, benefit the environment and ensure "clean, reliable and affordable electricity and power." None of the associated statements from the federal agency, AEP or West Virginia politicians mentioned other coal-related problems, such as mountaintop removal.
Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, has been linked to climate change. And coal-fired power plants and their operators occupy a political and environmental hot seat.
Utility officials have said the current capture and storage project is designed to validate the new technology.
Pat Hemlepp, an AEP spokesman, said the utility and technology partner Alstom Power will continue to mine data from the demonstration project, including studies of how plumes of carbon dioxide behave when injected more than a mile below the surface into "suitable geologic formations."
He acknowledged ongoing studies could identify glitches even in the midst of the multimillion dollar construction of the system's macro version.
"Nobody has done [carbon capture and storage] at the scale we are doing it," Hemlepp said. "So far, it's been going well. We've been capturing. We've been injecting."
The plan is to ratchet up the operation to commercial-scale by 2015. If the larger version becomes commercially viable, AEP and partners could sell the technology to other utilities.
As envisioned, at full-bore operation the capture and storage system would capture at least 90 percent of the carbon dioxide from 235 megawatts of the plant's 1,300 megawatts of capacity.
A construction date has not been set. Hemlepp said construction could create 1,000 jobs and that the system itself, once online, could require 30 to 50 employees.
DOE's allocation to AEP and two other recipients in support of commercial-scale carbon capture and storage technologies totaled $979 million. An unspecified portion of that amount included federal stimulus money.
AEP, an Ohio-based, publicly traded company, is the parent of Appalachian Power Co., which serves much of Southwest Virginia. Appalachian draws power from the Mountaineer plant.
