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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When CO2 is buried, it removes more oxygen than carbon. This oxygen would normally have been freed, when a plant eats the carbon. Removing food (CO2) from the atmosphere removes twice as much oxygen, from the cycle. Inverted smoke stacks… what a concept. GK
G. Karst says:
July 15, 2011 at 3:53 pm
I see what you are saying, and you are perfectly correct ……namely that CO2 sequestration by plants produces O2 into the atmosphere and therefore stashing away CO2 is removing (indirectly) our potential O2 supply. This is indeed correct – but hey, lets not bother the greens with a bit of factual information!
If CO2 were injected into the soil, won’t that trap heat rising from center of the earth? The whole planet will melt!!!
In addition to their negligence in burying CO2, AEP wants to kill tens of thousands of Americans:
http://tinyurl.com/3qfwyq3
Out of season, but here is another amusing bit from the same website:
http://tinyurl.com/6fdf3sp
G. Karst says:
“When CO2 is buried, it removes more oxygen than carbon.”
So, remove the oxygen from the CO2. Then you have pure carbon left, which you can burn again! Perpetual motion anyone?
/sarc
Aahhhmmmmm… Just which part of the Second Laws of Thermodynamics didn’t they understand. I mean, which state regulators, which federal regulators & who at AEP didn’t understand entropy!?
To control CO2, ie, bury it, should be “costless?” I’m creating more order & it should be cost competitive with plants not controlling the product of combustion. Would not have figured this from a industrial sector founded on entropy.
Who got paid off? Follow the money! What “Greenie” thought our money could be spent this way?
1/3 of the gross output from a plant would be required to capture, compress and inject the CO2 into the ground
I think that says it all; whether it’s 1/3, 1/5 or 1/2, it obviously does not make sense …. especially as I do not understand how this gas will stay underground. The historical carbon-capture mechanism has been the deposition of CO2, via various loops, of limestone in the ocean.
Following upon my previous post, I am surprised that the enviro-mentalists haven’t started complaining about the threat to life that is posed by the “burning” of Oxygen.
PS: Note “quotes”
“The original projected cost, before unanticipated overruns, was $668 million.”
There are always cost overruns, so why were they “unanticipated”? Wouldn’t it be smarter to add a significant percentage to the original estimate for cost overruns? Then if they don’t run over, they’LL be pleasantly surprised. Estimate $668 million, plus $200 million or so for overruns, but label it that way. “This project will cost $668 million to complete, but we anticipate probably another $200 million in cost overruns, if the general history of large projects is any indication.” Then let the contractors explain if there are in fact cost overruns.
Or better still, DON’T EVEN START SUCH STUPID AND WASTEFUL “PROJECTS.”
Interstellar Bill says:
July 15, 2011 at 2:21 pm
Umm, Which recent event? The best known is Lake Nyos in 1986 (a “soda straw fountain” is keeping the lake stable now). I think there was a smaller event several years later at a different volcanic lake. I don’t know of one in the last few years.
http://www.neatorama.com/2007/05/21/the-strangest-disaster-of-the-20th-century/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos
They should have had a greenhouse farm built all around the power plant. That way, they could simply let nature do what it does best: eat it for lunch.
So, lets figure this out, it takes 1/3 of the output to sequester ~1.5% of the CO2. So, if you use all of the output you could sequester ~4.5% of the CO2. Yeah, that’s the ticket, our customers will glady pay three times as much for NO ELECTRICITY to save the earth……..
MADNESS…..
Kevin
Ross says:
July 15, 2011 at 2:46 pm
Sure – a visually attracting image. A plant producing clear gas would look much like one that was shut down. Boring!
As for this story, note the caption – “Mountaineer Power Plant”. Note the lead paragraph. “American Electric Power has scuttled its pilot project to bury CO2 from its Mountaineer coal-burning plant….”
Perhaps next time Hugh McCullough can find an action photo of the accounting office at AEP. 🙂
I know how you can “sequester” CO2, and make a profit at the same time! Sell greenhouses that promise to grow plants twice as fast and then make a specialty device which pumps the CO2 into the the greenhouse. Of course, since CO2 from Satan himself, the greenhouse must have a way to keep the demonic CO2 inside. The power company can market it as “special plant food”.
Problem solved. CO2 is removed from the atmosphere, plants grow faster, and will allow the power company to recoup the costs of capture the demonic CO2.
I don’t like pumping CO2 into the ground. And I’m not as interested in flue gas capture as the general solution: direct capture from the atmosphere.
The 50% cost increase for the plant seemed low to me. I’ve mostly read that current CCS technologies would double the cost of electricity (from coal). And from what I’ve read that’s approximately the “real” cost of wind power as well – about double coal (without CCS) costs. So at this point, if, for whatever reason, we HAD TO reduce NET CO2 emissions from power generation, there doesn’t seem to be an economic reason to favor a massive shift to wind power over adding CCS to coal plants. (Does anyone have better numbers than mine on this?)
But since we don’t HAVE to do it now, and may NEVER need to, we obviously can’t expect private investors to risk much on a “maybe, but probably not” prospect.
And yet there is an important common interest in getting much better at CCS (including Direct CCS) as quickly as possible, because IF there is eventually a decision to reduce net CO2 emissions, the alternative to large scale, cheap and clean CCS would be CATASTROPHIC.
and
Since 1/3 of the output is required to capture the CO2 then 1/3 of the emissions is used to generate power to capture the CO2.
Therefore they generate between 2.6 and 3.3 million tons of CO2 so as to capture 110,000 tons.
Or to put it another another way for every ton of CO2 they capture they have to generate between 20 and 30 tons of CO2 to capture it.
Forget my comment above, I’m having comprehension difficulties due to lack of sleep.
Jeez, thank goodness they didn’t try this in CA. It would have been a no brainer to pass on the costs.
So for a mere $48 Billion, (before cost overrruns, of course), we could have taken the CO2 from a single coal plant, sequestered it, and reduced efficiency by about 33%, and increased cost by 50%, before accounting for the cost of capital. Who is failing to see the bargain in all of this?
It’s a 1330 megawatt plant. At 15% cost of capital, let’s say, it’s only an additional $6B per year for those 1330*24*365 or 11650800 megawatt hours. Assuming $0.1 per kWH cost normally, which is a typical, “all-in” cost, plus profit, it would only add 6e9/11.65e9 or $0.51 more per kWH for capital cost, or just over 5x the current cost, an increase of ONLY 410%, on top of the 50% direct cost increase. This means it costs 5x as much to sequester coal as to convert it to energy and deliver it. I’m particularly fond of fizzy groundwater too, so I’m not sure what all the fuss is about.
Now, you must know that the government was going to pay 50% of it, so that’s free money and doesn’t count, so it’s MUCH cheaper than 5x as expensive (like when you use real money).
Naturally, this technology can be applied to all coal plants in the world. By some estimates, there are 50,000 electric generating plants, but let’s just say for the fun of it, there are only 1000 coal plants. I’m sure there are no more than that. In Illinois. You see then, that it would only cost $48 Trillion to convert all of those to this amazing new technology, which, by the way, would also produce lots of other great jobs mining all that iron ore to make all the steel that you would spend most of the $48 Trillion on, which also, incidentally, requires HUGE amounts of electricity to produce, which takes lots of COAL!. So it’s a win-win. Caterpillar and would LOVE all THOSE green jobs (that’s why they are a part of USCAP!). Hey, for that matter, so would Duke Energy! No wonder they’re buddies!
Now, some might claim that since China is putting 50GW of new coal capacity online each YEAR, my analysis might be a little understated. Because capturing all of that would be $38*48B, or 1.8 Trillion, just for the new plants, per year. CHEAP!!! I think we piss that away each year just on the little global warming ratings stickers they’re putting on new cars these days. So it’s a great deal.
$Trillion is the new $Billion. By the time we reaaally start ramping up the green jobs, $Quadrillion will be the new $Trillion. It’s good. With inflation, you also get paid more!!! Excellent!
Maybe it would be easier to drop logs down a hole. Or bury them in a landfill.
It would be a real struggle to make a coal fired power plant capture CO2 cost effectively. The typical limestone forced oxidation scrubbers do a pretty good job on SO2 but annoying amounts of pollutants still get through the process. To get a pure stream of CO2 to inject into rock formations takes of lot of downstream chemical processing and electricity from the power plant. The parasitic load and maintenance/operation of auxiliary equipment decreases overall efficiency and drives up the cost of production. Coal gasification is a better way to go, but that comes with its own set of problems.
Michael D Smith (@6:14 PM). Don’t forget the sarc/ indicator. Otherwise the Greens will take this excellent proposal and run with it. They love big numbers, especially for checks made out to their friends, and paid by the taxpayer.
OK, folks let’s get some facts clear. The Mountaineer project was going to take an equivalent of 235 MW, not the whole plant’s output, and sequester that amount of CO2. The cost was going to be $668 million, the feds were going to kick in half as a stimulus-funded CCPI-3 project. This was to be the jumbo installation, the largest in the world, yes even larger than in Kyoto protocol Europe. AEP had already installed and operated a 20 MW CCS pilot (the “small” plant) at Mountaineer that ran for almost 2 years before being shut down in May at the planned end of the project.
The technology they intended to use was chilled ammonia, which has parasitic power draw of 15 to 20% of the plant output, not 1/3, that is the old monoethanolamine (MEA) process that is being rapidly eclipsed by newer solvents.
AEP was motivated to take the risk on being an early adopter of CCS technoloby because of their exposure to coal powered plants. Almost all of their tens of thousands of mw of power generation is coal (they do have one 2 unit nuclear station). When AEP made the decision to head in this direction, Waxman-Marckey was staring the industry in the face and it looked inevitable that some form of carbon regulation was going to be passed. Thank goodness that did not happen!
In spite of the pending EPA regulations of CO2, CCS is still not looking good. It is still hugely expensive, even with the advances in technology. Add this on top of all of the other regulations that are a part of EPA’s war on coal, and you will find Grandma cannot afford any of it.
BTW, I do not work for AEP, but I am a engineer who has studied their efforts extensively. In a way it is sad that the work these guys have put into this, not only at AEP but across the nation, is for naught, but I must say it is good for consumers this project is going down the tubes. And I hope the public will continue to wake up and realize CCS is a costly pipe dream that will never mitigate global warming.
I work for AEP, at their nuclear plant, but speak only for myself.
This was to be installed at a plant that is operated in a regulated utility……like many/most generating plants are in the USA. Once the political winds changed away from carbon legislation no regulator was going to allow cost recovery for this project. They already had a proof of concept CCS system operating on a small portion of Mountaineer’s exhaust, about a 20Mw slipstream I think. It was using about 30% of the slipstream power to power the CCS equipment. Again, 30% of the slipstream value not 30% of total plant output. They were hoping to get down to about 20% parasitic load. Obviously, this would still be a huge deal to de-rate every coal power plant CCS is attached to by 20-35%. This 600 million plus project was still only going to be on 2 or 3 hundred MWe slipstream I believe……..utility scale so to speak but NOT the full plant output.
The geology of this area was favorable to sequester CO2 underground. Conceptually this makes sense, this is after all how we store large volumes of natural gas in this country. However, not every coal plant is in a geologically acceptable area so as a practical matter this was a pipe dream IMHO. It would have all been a big waste of money anyway since it was to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.
Michael D Smith says:
July 15, 2011 at 6:14 pm
“……So it’s a win-win. Caterpillar and would LOVE all THOSE green jobs (that’s why they are a part of USCAP!). Hey, for that matter, so would Duke Energy! No wonder they’re buddies! ……”
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Exactly! You tied it together just right! (But with one minor correction.) Caterpillar recently pulled out of USCAP. Duke is still hanging in though, praying this madness will go through.
Obviously, what many morons thought, is that energy companies gave a damn about the cost of their product. They don’t, as long as they get to pass the cost on. Often, they even get a little bump beyond the cost. It makes their investors happy when stuff like that occurs. I’m sure they’re more than miffed some regulatory agency wouldn’t let them just move the cost to the consumers. In Cali, it isn’t a problem, in fact, they financed their smart grid implementation twice!!! Most aren’t very bright over there, but we love ’em anyway. (There are many notable exceptions who frequent this site.) 🙂
In a bizarre way though, the goal of the watermelons is succeeding. We’re using less electricity. This is because the capital spent on stupidity such as CO2 sequestering is capital not spent on economic growth. We consume less electricity because we do less. We don’t have the money to do more. Poverty for the U.S. is outcome desired by the green movement.
Not only the media, but a widely used college-level, conceptual physics textbook shows a comparison of “smokestacks” two days. One on a humid, cold day when water vapor condenses readily to a visible cloud, and one on a hot, dry day when the vapor stays vapor, and then sells the fiction that the difference is smoke–it doesn’t look remotely like smoke.
The 1/3 figure is for capturing all of the CO2, but it is still madness as you say.