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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I did some number crunching on this issue since in Alberta, Canada, they still want to spend about a billion dollars on one carbon capture project. At the present time, humans emit about 90 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every DAY. I DO NOT believe this to be the case, however let us assume there will be the IPCC average number of 3 degrees C increase in temperature due to our emissions if we do nothing. So if a billion dollars is spent to capture 1 million tons a YEAR, this amounts to a fraction of 1 in 32,850. So if nothing is done, the temperature will presumably go up 3.0000 degrees C, but if a billion dollars is spent, the temperature would go up by 2.9999 degrees. Or to put in another way, if we take the temperature of 10,000 cities now and then again in 100 years from now, 9,999 cities will then be 3 degrees warmer and 1 will be 2 degrees warmer. Is this correct?
Someone tell Juliar Gillard and the Australian Labor party. Way to go, you big “polluders”
LOL
Step 1: soda pop co-gen facility. Step 2: Profit!
Anyone surprised that the cost of carbon dioxide capture does not have any grounding in economics or engineering? When I first heard that they were seriously considering such an idea, I was amazed and a bit dismayed by they possibility that intelligent people in positions of authority and responsibility (and who are paid very well) would actually consider such a stupid plan.
Is there ONE Greenie power proposal that makes sense?? After the breeze from the hand-waving stops and the concealing curtains sag, I’ve never come across one that wasn’t flawed and moribund at the core.
Pity the electric power producer … they’re damned no matter what they do. One regulatory body’s goal is to keep rates low for the consumers. Another regulatory body’s goal is to make them reduce emissions so much that it raises the cost of producing the electricity. And, being caught between a rock and a hard place, if they shut down facilities as being prohibitively too expensive to operate, they’ll get damned for the rolling blackouts and brownouts.
Jeff’s right, insane.
1DandyTroll says:
July 15, 2011 at 3:30 pm
“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”,”
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Either I misunderstand what you are saying, or you don’t understand the chemisty of combustion.
I read your comments as saying that the coal fired plants need to run at the optimum air- fuel ratio to reduce their emissions. This is true for emissions of CO, partially burned fuel, and oxides of nitrogen ( which are the emissions the auto industry has reduced). BUT this post is about capturing CO2. You know the greenhouse gas-carbon dioxide.
I notice you comment often, so perhaps a basic chemisty of combustion lesson will help your comments. When you burn carbon (in the case of coal) or hydrocarbons (in case of gasoline for cars) you get the most CO2 when you have the optimum air to fuel ratio (that is, enough air to completely burn all the fuel. The technical term is stoichiometric air- fuel ratio). Burning lean (more air) of stoichiometric is actually somehat more efficient, but will increase the oxides of nitrogen in the exhaust.
Of course coal fired power plants already know this, so they actually operate at the most efficient air-fuel ratio, and thus maximize the amount of CO2 in the exhaust, while minimizing CO, and partially burned fuel.
I, like many others who comment here, believe that CO2 is plant food, so the more the better. No need to capture it.
HOW DO WE KNOW IT IS SAFE TO PUMP THIS INTO THE GROUND?
It might sound a tad stoopid, but hey look what fracking is and has done in the way of pollunting the ground water people rely on for life……
Okay, that is pretty darn profound. Did the AGW cultists even consider this?
We will also be trying to capture CO2 under the Baltic Sea:
http://wiadomosci.gazeta.pl/Wiadomosci/1,80273,9957662,Na_Baltyku_maja_powstac_skladowiska_dwutlenku_wegla.html
The idiocy is an international problem…
CCS is an untried practice with unknown consequences. Apart from the fact that it will do nothing to tame climate or stop climate changing, it has the potential to cause all sorts of harm.
It is also unnecessary because the theory of GHG’s is faulty and does not do what it says on the tin.
You can buy dry ice starting at one (1) dollar per 10 to 50 pounds which, um, is one pound on CO2. For about 5 million or so, they could have “recovered” the CO2 simply by buying it from dry ice manufacturers. Or a bit over 100 years of “recovery” for the money spent (not counting that had they invested the money and paid with earnings, it would have been until the Sun dies).
What would have been really brilliant would to have simple built some synfuel plants and let the carbon be recycle. Do the math. 10 million tons of CO2 will produce how many gallons of liquid methane (aka natural gas)? And gee, you can sell it.
Consider a single 500MW gen-set, of which there are typically between 80 and 100, or equivalent powering the UK at any given time.
If one third of that 500MW goes into CCS then maybe half of that will finish up as stored energy in the compressed gas. So about 80MW is being pumped into the ground or ‘stored’
Over the course of one year, each 500MW gen-set will thus be storing about 2,500 Terajoules.
Then consider that one ton of TNT contains about 4 Gigajoules and about 63 Terajoules were released over Hiroshima.
So, over the course of one year in the UK, a CCS equipped 500MW gen-set will store as much energy in the form of compressed gas as were released in 40 Hiroshimas. There are 100+ such gen-sets here in the UK alone.
And the watermelons worry about a few tons of nuclear waste being stored underground.
What planet are those people on?
It would probably be cheaper and more effective for the power company to obtain waste paper, slurry the paper and ram it into old coal mines. That way they can sequester more carbon than was extracted by the coal mining and basically make the coal carbon-neutral.
crosspatch says:
July 16, 2011 at 6:13 am
It would probably be cheaper and more effective for the power company to obtain waste paper, slurry the paper and ram it into old coal mines. That way they can sequester more carbon than was extracted by the coal mining and basically make the coal carbon-neutral.
You mean that nice green paper also known as Dollars. It makes perfect sense.
Earth has a number of ways of sequestering carbon and it does it much more efficiently and productively than humans have been able to envision. What type of people do we have in government that are willing to spend (waste) so much money on projects that have no hope of being successful for so many reasons? Surely they must have first done an advanced engineering study for a few thousand dollars that told them how risky, inefficient and costly it was going to be…….and then ignored it.
CCS is a total misallocation of resources. A massive investment for absolutely no return.
I as an engineer, I worked in natural gas processing for better than 25 years and had lots of opportunities to work with and on numerous amine systems removing acid gases from the production stream of which CO2 was one of the components (H2S was generally the other component if present). Early in the production field life, the production could be introduced into the process at the normal operating pressure of the amine systems (800 – 1200 psig or there abouts) but after the pressure in the reservoir declined, the production stream had to be compressed up to the inlet pressure of the amine systems thereby adding another step in the process. (The main plants I worked on were the Whitney Canyon Plant and the Anschutz Ranch East Plant.)
Amine systems alone are hard to maintain and at times hard to operate. Given another step in the process (compression) the complication of the process is increased markedly. CCS has this complication riight from the beginning with compression taking the furnace effluent from essentially atmospheric pressure up to the operating pressure of the amine system. The metallurgy of the entire system has to be of a corrosion resistant material (a stainless steel of some grade) which means very significant initial investement.
Plus remember that the inlet stream to the amine system will be mainly N2 so the entire system will be designed to handle a gas stream that only has small portion is CO2. (I haven’t done the stoichiometry to figure out the percentage). The N2 will be vented to the atmosphere. There might be some energy recovery process to get some of the energy back from compressing the N2 up to plant pressure but having tried to do some of that at one of the plants, it’s not easy.
As I type this, I’m thinking of the difficulties about running the CCS plant. If anyone thinks that all the CO2 produced from a coal fired plant would be pumped downhole (I have little experience working on CO2 injection flood projects but know they have their own unique problems) they are delusional. Just as a natural gas processing plant has a flare system to handle the inlet stream when there is a plant upset, so to will a CCS plant vent CO2 when that plant has an upset or otherwise down.
Again, CCS is a terrible idea.
Don Bennett
Evanston, WY
“Blade says:
July 16, 2011 at 12:39 am
G. Karst [July 15, 2011 at 3:53 pm] says:
“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”
Okay, that is pretty darn profound. Did the AGW cultists even consider this?”
At the present time, the oxygen content of dry air is 20.95%. Now let us assume that the CO2 increased by 0.01% in the last 200 years. If all of this ‘extra’ CO2 were to be converted to carbon and oxygen, the oxygen content in dry air would go up to 20.96%. But if all of this extra CO2 were buried, the oxygen content would remain at 20.95%. However burying the CO2 does not really deprive us of the oxygen in it since if left in the air tied up as CO2, we still do not have access to this oxygen. (P.S. I am aware that plants increase photosynthesis with more CO2, but this about the excess CO2 that plants are not able to use.)
cedarhill and Bob Barker:
cedarhill, you make a good point at July 16, 2011 at 3:05 am when you say;
“You can buy dry ice starting at one (1) dollar per 10 to 50 pounds which, um, is one pound on CO2. For about 5 million or so, they could have “recovered” the CO2 simply by buying it from dry ice manufacturers. Or a bit over 100 years of “recovery” for the money spent (not counting that had they invested the money and paid with earnings, it would have been until the Sun dies).”
Yes, and if they dropped the dry ice into deep ocean then it would melt to form a pool of liquid CO2 on the ocean floor (CO2 is liquid at those temperatures and pressures). It would stay there for millenia. I first suggested this method of disposal in the early 1980s when the issues of possible CCS were first requested for consideration by the UK’s Coal Research Establishment where I was employed. It is hard to see any significant environmental effect of, for example, filling the Marianas Trench with such a pool (except that it removes CO2 from use by biota).
Later we conducted studies on membranes capable of seperating CO2 from power station flue gases. This is difficult to achieve because other substances in flue gases damage the membranes. I then pointed out that it was not necessary to remove the CO2 from the flue gas because obtaining CO2 from any source provides the same result. However, the fear was that legislation could be applied to limit CO2 emissions from power stations, and the purpose of the research was an attempt to prepare for such legislation: the research was not addressed at any real solution to any other potential or real issue (but may provide the possible spin-off of H2 seperation from coal gasifier output),
Bob Barker, at July 16, 2011 at 7:53 am you suggest;
“Surely they must have first done an advanced engineering study for a few thousand dollars that told them how risky, inefficient and costly it was going to be…….and then ignored it.”
I think they “ignored” nothing because I suspect the project was a PR exercise and not a serious engineering proposal which included an intention of implementation: I explain this suspicion in my above post at July 15, 2011 at 2:21 pm.
Richard
Blade says:
July 16, 2011 at 12:39 am
You think you’re kidding.
Great minds are already working on it.
http://www.disclose.tv/forum/atmospheric-oxygen-levels-fall-as-carbon-dioxide-rises-t29534.html
Werner Brozek says:
July 16, 2011 at 8:44 am
OK, I’ll admit I was being as facetious as the next guy wrt to the problem of “removing” O2 from the atmosphere, but I don’t follow your math (actually, your premise).
How can any scenario involving burning fossil fuels lead to an increase of O2 in the atmosphere?
oeman50 and Doug Badgero, thanks for your rational discussion of AEP’s CCS project (I work for AEP).
I would encourage all to consider that AEP’s “pilot scale” project might have been a pretty wise move – putting real engineering (proving it can be done) and economic analysis in front everyone. AEP has now presented a full “demonstration scale” project to their regulators (a proxy for customers) and the regulators have said they don’t want to spend that much money (a reasonable conclusion).
I am told that if you burn .66 tonnes of Carbon in 1.66 tonnes of Oxygen, you get 2.0 tonnes of CO2. So two thirds of what you are sequestering forever is Oxygen. If every Coal fired plant in the world was set up for this, how long would it take to notice a measurable decrease in oxygen levels?
BTW, didn’t all the scientists and engineers involved in this project do Botany 101 at High School? These things called ‘plants’ have been successfully sequestering CO2 and returning a pointless by-product called ‘Oxygen’ for millennia! It is of note that the brown coal fired generators in Victoria are located in the LaTrobe Valley, the states main vegetable growing area is located downstream of the exhaust plume from the power stations. All that H2O and CO2 coming to ground around the growing vegetables! 😉
Typical governmental stupidity – forcing a company to bury plant food.