Story submitted by Hugh McCullough
American Electric Power has scuttled its pilot project to bury CO2 from its Mountaineer coal-burning plant in Red Haven WVa. The original projected cost, before unanticipated overruns, was $668 million. About 1/3 of the gross output from a plant would be required to capture, compress and inject the CO2 into the ground, generating an automatic 50% increase in the cost of net output, before conversion costs.
“The AEP plan, announced with much fanfare in 2009, marked the first time that carbon dioxide was to be captured and buried at a US power plant.”
The pilot system would only have captured 110,000 tons of CO2 per year, out of a total of 7.9 to 9.8 million tons per year from the plant. The company, headquartered in Columbus, “cited difficulties in getting state regulators to approve charging customers for the costs of carbon capture.”
From this morning’s Columbus (OH) Dispatch: http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/business/stories/2011/07/15/high-costs-bury-aeps-carbon-plan.html?sid=101
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Imagine that! Trying to pass on a cost to the consumer!! Chuckle.
I hope people begin to realize just how serious this insanity is.
OT: Did you guys see T Boone Pickens sueing the Ontario Government?
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/ontario/texas-wind-power-group-launches-trade-challenge-to-ontarios-green-energy-laws/article2097335/
Worth each others…
It does indeed sound like people are beginning to understand how EXPENSIVE (and perhaps useless) it is to sequester CO2. And to think this plan was rejected where they were going to sequester from 1.1 to 1.4% of the total CO2 emitted from this power plant. It must be pretty expensive to force a non-combustible gas into solid rock.
The recent mass deaths from a CO2-burping African crater-lake
would be as nothing to what one of these sites could do
if all its CO2 was released, at the wrong time.
Let this insanity go far enough and even the Johnstown Flood will be surpassed in woe.
First they kill the birds with windmills, then it’ll be us with concentrated CO2.
The article says;
“The pilot system would only have captured 110,000 tons of CO2 per year, out of a total of 7.9 to 9.8 million tons per year from the plant.”
So, at most only 1.4%of the emitted CO2 would have been captured.
And the article says;
“About 1/3 of the gross output from a plant would be required to capture, compress and inject the CO2 into the ground, generating an automatic 50% increase in the cost of net output, before conversion costs.”
So, to achieve the trivial amount of CO2 the plant’s electricity output would be reduced by more than a 1/3 and the cost of its electricity output would increased by more than 50%.
Nobody could have been so foolish as to think either the shareholders in the company or the consumers of its product would accept such large losses of output with such large increases to costs for so trivially small an amount of CO2 capture.
In other words, the scheme could not have been a serious proposal so must have been a PR stunt.
Richard
I knew it was a plan that wouldn’t hold water, let alone CO2.
If they are so worried about fracking leaking methane (which it doesn’t), why would they think the CO2 would stay put?
Of all the consequences of forgetting the chemical equation for photosynthesis, this is one of the worst. After all the trouble getting coal out of its long slumber in the earth, then we want to BURY the most valuable product–the carbon dioxide that could lead to more life on Earth.
Where is the Embodied Energy analysis and what is the Energy Returned On Energy Invested (EROEI) for this project?
Or to say it another way, how many tons of CO2 will be generated designing, fabricating, erecting, operating, maintaining, and decommissioning this project versus how many tons will ultimately be buried?
And once buried, how do we know that it will stay there and not leak back into the atmosphere?
Stunning, jaw-dropping insanity.
“What we have here…. is a failure to communicate!” – classic line from the movie “Cool Hand Luke”
This is a marketing failure, plain and simple!. The captured CO2 should be sold at a premium price, as a superior insulation material because of it’s ‘proven, settled science’ capability to capture ‘heat’.
};>)
They didn’t think AEP was going to swallow the cost, did they?
This is why adults should be making economic choices and policies and not watermelons.
I second ‘The Air Vent’.
It is typical of the socialist mindset that costs should never be passed on.
Water, food and shelter are the essential requirements for human survival so, of course they should all be free in the socialist Utopia. Try that in Tesco or Walmart!
They still got stung on the cost of the pilot project unless the Feds footed the bill.
If they are in California, they’ll eventually pay fines that ammount to a large portion of that expenditure. That would suit CA just fine. It’ll be just like the gasoline taxes, huge revenue for the beurocracy and zero benefit to the taxpayer other than a new shiny yoke for our necks.
Can anyone explain why when dealing with any “climate change” story the media continue to show exhaust stacks from installations, either industrial or power generation, belching water vapour from heat exchangers into the atmosphere ?
Is it because, unlike 40 years ago, they can’t find any actual smokestacks belching visible pollution ?
Clearly this is a deception to reinforce a pre-ordained message.
Does it work ?
I mean, if a plant really wants to “do something” about CO2 they can send stack gasses into their cooling ponds and grow algae. The algae is then harvested to turn into fertilizer or biofuel.
They made the mistake of not getting subsidized.
This is how you do it:
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-08-06/ameren-carbon-capture-plant-gets-1-billion-from-u-s-.html
Excerpt:
Aug. 6 (Bloomberg) — The Obama administration pledged $1 billion in stimulus funds to capture carbon emissions from a coal-fired Ameren Corp. power plant in Illinois, the biggest U.S. effort to show the polluting fuel can be made cleaner.
===========
This “plan” has been going back and forth between approval and cancellation for years, not sure if this is the final resolution
I do know our previous Governor is going to jail, they “all” do.
So will this pivotal story make it into the mainstream?
Hmmm, Friday afternoon. I bet no.
They always pass the cost on to the consumer,didn’t you realize that yet.
I’m gonna miss that “clean coal” plant…NOT.
I think we have better things to do with carbon than dig it up and bury it again. 🙂
As a Geologist and Geo-engineer, I find the principle of CO2 capture and effective subterranean storage somewhat unlikely. As a pro-nuclear power supporter it irks me even more to think that the greenies will have us pay through the nose for CO2 friendly energy but , in the same breath will argue that nuclear is too expensive! Frickin idots! Imagine how much cleaner the atmosphere today would be if nuclear had taken off in the 70’s? Imagine how much more expertise and R&D would have been achieved, etc, etc……..Greenpeace? – bunch of greenp*ssheads if you ask me…….someday, in the not too distant future, history will write that mankinds development has been seriously restrained by the actions of a crass few……
I think they missed the era of perfect combustion ratios and what not, when you inject just the right amount of air to get the “perfect burn”, oh wait they did that in the automobile industry already to lower all kinds of emissions from imperfect and incomplete burn process.
Obviously the car industry is a smashing success, so maybe the coal fired industry can do the same, but then again there’s not much of any subsidies for changing the air flow.
Any chance this plan was floated as an object lesson to state regulators? Betcha none of those guys want to hear any more talk about sequestration.
Scott Covert says:
July 15, 2011 at 2:46 pm
“. . . they’ll eventually pay fines . . .”
That made me chuckle because I read this in the WSJ this morning:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303406104576445752787189310.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop
Headline from WSJ Review & Outlook:
Cellulosic Ethanol and Unicorns
“The EPA punishes oil refiners for not buying a product no one makes.”
I think carbon capture is where we need to watch the oil companies and oil barons so to speak. For years, their big claim to fame is that we need to inject the CO2 into the ground and the second benefit to this is that you can pump more oil out of wells if you do this. All well and true, but like people have already referenced, bad things happen if the CO2 suddenly comes to the surface all at once….like death and massive destruction.
Follow the money…oil companies in general fund green companies and people really wonder why? Its not just for the image (I am sure that it helps of course) but its for the benefits they get alltogether.
But do not ask oil companies to actually pay for this sequestering of CO2. Their idea is to get customers to pay for this so that they get free oil out of the ground basically at taxpayer or energy user expense. I think we can all cheer on this failing and hope for more failure in this type of endeavor.
Nothing like pumping harmless plant food underground where it can become an environmental and human castatrophe….
Such terrible ideas and we wonder how greens come up with them. Look at the money and where its coming from. Simple.