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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Thanks, Doug — I was just going by what I interpreted the article as saying. It does say “Existing carbon-dioxide systems would drain a third of a coal plant’s electricity and double consumers’ bills,” and I had heard a similar 1/3 (or 30%) from an AEP engineer a while back, but this would suggest they were hoping to develop a more efficient procedure in this project.
You say they’re talking 30% of the slipstream value, not 30% of total plant output. What’s a slipstream?
Even a 20% parasitic load would mean a 25% increase in cost, before capital costs.
Most of these solutions seem far too complicated. Just buy lots of dry ice and spread it around.
Result: Global freezing not Global warming!
“John M says:
July 16, 2011 at 10:05 am
How can any scenario involving burning fossil fuels lead to an increase of O2 in the atmosphere?”
I was actually talking about the opposite, namely getting the oxygen back from the CO2 when I said:
“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 speaking of dropping oxygen levels as others have done, at what point would fires and stop burning and cars stop running? I would think this would happen much sooner than for human beings to be affected, but I am not sure about this. Granted, a drop of a percent or two of oxygen may mean that no new running records will be set.
DonS (@3:35 7/15) has this AEP project correct. AEP was getting tremendous pressure from the WV PUCO and its Ohio counterpart to “do something” about the growing “war on coal” from various congress critters and others. The lure of some matching funds made a pre-known failure that much easier. AEP knew up-front what the costs and power penalty would be. I am not an AEP employee and have opposed them in regulatory proceedings on occasion. But they know of what they do.
Hu,
A slipstream is just a portion of another flow stream. For instance, if the full plant stack flow is 1,000,000 pounds per hour (pph) then a 10% slipstream is 100,000 pph. It is just diverting a portion of the stack flow……or some other flow stream. For instance, we frequently use slipstream de-ionizers on condensate flow to cleanup the secondary system prior to plant startup.
Werner Brozek says (July 16, 2011 at 4:00 pm): “But speaking of dropping oxygen levels as others have done, at what point would fires and stop burning and cars stop running?”
Dunno. How high up Mt. Everest do you have to go before fire fizzles (if it does) and people suffocate? IIRC, acclimated experts have climbed Everest without supplemental oxygen.
Ah, I was right: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/everest/history/firstwoo2.html
Gary Hladik:
At July 16, 2011 at 9:42 pm you reply to Werner Brozek having asked (at July 16, 2011 at 4:00 pm):
“But speaking of dropping oxygen levels as others have done, at what point would fires and stop burning and cars stop running?”
You reply;
“Dunno. How high up Mt. Everest do you have to go before fire fizzles (if it does) and people suffocate? IIRC, acclimated experts have climbed Everest without supplemental oxygen.”
With respect, that is not the issue.
Natural forest fires are burning all the time. They are initiated by natural effects notably lightening. And they are extinguished by e.g. rain.
The probability of a fire starting increases, and the probability of it being extinguished reduces, as available oxygen increases.
So, air always contains about 20% oxygen at sea level.
Much more than ~20% in the air and more oxygen is converted to CO2 by natural fires.
Much less than ~20% in the air and less oxygen is converted to CO2 by natural fires.
Richard
PS I must now leave to fulfil some duties so I am not able to answer any responses to this post until later, probably this evening.
Thanks, Doug, for your expert comments — I see I was misleading to suggest that either the first or second stage would try to capture 100% of the plant’s gross output. In fact the (completed?) first stage only captured a little over 1% of the plant’s gross output, while the (now abandoned) second stage was only intended to capture about 25% of the the gross output. So what I should apparently have said was that the procedure has an energy cost of 1/3 of the gross output captured, and then only under the old technology, 15 or 20% of gross output captured being the goal of the newer technology.
Is it feasible to capture a fraction approaching 100% of plant output, or does maintaining an updraft require allowing a big fraction like 75% to escape?
My understanding (from a discussion with an AEP engineer a few years ago) was that the old technology, at least, merely compressed the gas until the CO2 condensed into liquid state, and then forced the liquid down a well, with no use of solvents, etc. But oeman50 (above) states that the old process used monoethanolamine (MEA) solvent, while the new, more efficient technology would use ammonia instead. Does neither process rely on forceable condensation? Do the solvents go down the well along with the CO2? How much energy does it take to manufacture the solvents?
Also, is the $668 million figure mentioned for the (completed?) phase 1 burying 1% of the output, or for the (now abandoned) phase 2 burying 25% of the output?
Do you think it is realistic to expect this stuff to stay buried for thousands of years, or will there be CO2 geysers within a few decades or centuries?
Since each atom of C burned to make CO2 removes something just over double its mass from the O2 pool, doubling the CO2 fraction of the atmosphere would have double the increase’s amount reducing effect on the O2 supply.
So let’s do the numbers:
From .039% to .078% is of course a .039%x2 = .078% (of total atmosphere) drop in O2,
from 21% to 20.922%.
It might be detectable. Probably not.
IOW, this is either a joke issue or more Warmista BS. Probably both.
The minute impact of burning on O2 levels brings up an interesting issue that’s been itching at the back of my mind, apparently.
It’s pretty much agreed that O2 is so reactive that it would vanish in a (geologically) brief period of time if photosynthetic organisms (biota, mostly, though plants make up some of it). So, now that CO2 food levels are so low (.039/20 x 100% = 0.195% of atmospheric oxygen) that establishes a kind of metric for how much “turnover” of CO2 there must be to keep O2 levels stable.
I don’t know the “no-replacement extinction” rate of O2, but if it were, say, 0.1%/annum that would mean that the CO2 would have to turn over .1/.039 = 2.6x per annum. Which is a lot.
Anyone have a plausible figure for the O2 extinction rate?
Oops, I think I wanted 0.1/0.195 = 0.5. Which may be in the right range, which suggests my WAG of 0.1%/annum O2 extinction rate is also plausible.
One-third of the plant’s 1300MW gross output is required to capture ~1.3% of the carbon? Doesn’t take much math to see that capturing carbon takes more energy than is produced burning it! And the power to capture the carbon comes from — burning carbon! What happened to engineering economics?
This must be the warmunist’s version of “sustainability”.
OK, my mistake, from some of the comments above it takes about 1/3 power to remove all the CO2 out of a given stream.
It’s still ridiculous.
When we burn carbon based fuel, we are burning carbon that has been sequestered for millions of years. It was once atmospheric but is now fossil. This is not the case with the oxygen used for combustion. This oxygen comes directly from our current, present atmosphere stock. Sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere will therefore draw down the existing stock of oxygen.
I admit that atmospheric oxygen is present in much greater volume than CO2, however what we are sequestering is not carbon. It is the vital atmospheric oxygen that is being sequestered and should be referred to as oxygen sequestering… Not carbon! How much actual O2 can safely be sequestered without risk? That is the first question that should have been answered before the first pilot project was put to paper. It is the unintended consequences (rife in such projects) that always seems to bite us in the ass. GK
Hu,
The 660+ million figure is for the 25% of plant power slipstream project. I do not think it was ever credible to sequester our coal plant CO2 effluents in geological formations. My opinion is based on the fact that not all plants are located in a geologically acceptable area and it would not be economic to pipe the CO2 to acceptable areas from those that aren’t well suited to the purpose. To be clear though, I am an engineer by education and a plant operator by experience…..25+ years. However, none of that experience is in coal generation it is all in nuclear. I have just had access to the internal employee communications on this project, but so has every other AEP employee.
AEP was just doing what is prudent in terms of how to keep using coal in a CO2 constrained world. Anyone who knows anything about power generation knows there was no way we could just “walk away” from coal generation. It is interesting though to consider how a regulated utility makes its money, including AEP in many of its jurisdictions. If you convince the regulator to allow you to deploy capitol, whether it is to produce more power or clean up “pollution”, you are allowed to earn a return on that invested capitol. This creates a perverse incentive to spend more money if the regulator agrees.
you have all been so clever and scientific explaining the stupidity of this…. I have something to make you smile…. this entire Carbon Dioxide Taxation Fiasco needs to be dumped and quickly!
This is a hoot – tiz ridiculous and about as stupid as the soon to be enforced Carbon Dioxide Tax we are all going to suffer under. Agnes is our Agony Aunt.
http://justmeint.wordpress.com/2011/07/18/ask-agnes-she-knows-about-carbon-dioxide-taxation/