Here is their Twitter announcement
We told you we were serious about carbon capture & #CCUS! Check out this exciting announcement on commercialization. We are proud of our partners. #decadeofaction #np2050 #wecapturecarbon #environment #economy Thx @AkshatRathi @8riverscapital #NetZero
Originally tweeted by NET Power (@_NETPower) on April 15, 2021.
And additional coverage from E&E News
Carlos Anchondo, E&E News reporter Published: Friday, April 16, 2021
Net Power LLC’s pilot natural gas power plant in La Porte, Texas, achieved “first fire” in 2018. Yesterday, developers announced that the company’s technology is now planned for two at-scale plants in Colorado and Illinois. @_NetPower/Twitter
Colorado and Illinois are slated to host the world’s first emissions-free gas power plants, according to an announcement yesterday from a clean technology company.
8 Rivers Capital LLC announced plans to build an at-scale gas plant in each state by 2025, deploying proprietary technology from Net Power LLC to generate 280 megawatts of clean electricity.
Industry observers called yesterday’s announcements “huge” and said Net Power’s technology could be instrumental to realizing a lower-carbon electric grid in the United States.
Unlike at a conventional natural gas plant, the energy startup’s technology burns natural gas with pure oxygen, instead of the air, only producing carbon dioxide and water as byproducts. Most of the CO2 is reused as part of Net Power’s four-step cycle, with the excess CO2 captured and “pipeline ready” for underground storage.
Founded in 2010, Net Power achieved “first fire” in 2018 at its testing facility outside of Houston, which the company says validated the technology (Greenwire, May 31, 2018).
8 Rivers is a co-owner of Net Power and is developing each of the projects with separate parties. Both plants would be connected to the grid, according to the developers.
Rich Powell, executive director of the conservative clean energy group ClearPath, called Net Power’s technology a “game changer” and said it could leverage the “virtually infinite supply of low-cost natural gas” in the United States.
“If this thing works, the job of decarbonizing the U.S. power sector gets a whole lot easier,” Powell said yesterday, adding that the “major hurdles are really behind these projects.”
Net Power said it plans to license out the technology. Natural gas makes up roughly 36% of total U.S. electricity generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Deepika Nagabhushan, program director of decarbonized fossil energy at the Clean Air Task Force, said in a statement that it’s exciting to see another “carbon capture technology company working to develop projects to supply zero-carbon firm power, which we know is going to be key to achieving [a] net-zero carbon electricity grid.”
I find it difficult to see what this process achieves. It generates power from burning natural gas, but so what? A lot of plants do that. But then it reclaims the CO2 for capture and storage. That needs an additional plant. But even more it needs an oxygen plant to supply the process. That’s three plants, only one of which generates power while the other two consume it. Is anyone prepared to bet that the overall thermal efficiency will not be very low?
Now, if only “decarbonizing the power sector” would make a detectable difference in the climate. Oh, wait! Why in the world would we want a different climate from what we have, give or take a bit?
It would be useful to see the energy cots of the oxygen gathering and the CO2 sequestration. How much of the normal power output will not be missing?
And underground storage of CO2 is also expensive and how large is their underground storage. Likely the storage is elsewhere which means pipes, etc. or shipping, etc.
Can someone explain why this is a big deal.
Back about 1980′ I was measuring exhaust emissions of motor vehicles in a laboratory in Sydney as part of a major study. I remember we tested a Japanese taxi that ran on natural gas and had catalytic converters to clean up the exhaust. The CO, HC, and NOX emissions were at or below background levels i.e. it actually cleaned up any hydrocarbons in the atmosphere. CO2 and H2O were the only emissions.
If they could do that 40 years ago using air, not pure oxygen, why can’t we do even better in 2021? Is this all about getting headlines and getting more government subsidies for rather pointless R&D?
They have not really decarbonised the economy at all, just cleaned up the HC emissions (which is no big deal). They still have to sequester the CO2, which is “pipeline ready”. Well, so is the CO2 from every other fossil fuel plant.
The closer you read this article, the more you realise it is utter bollocks.
“…with the excess CO2 captured and “pipeline ready” for underground storage.”
And what if there is a leak?
In August 1986, an eruption of a billion cubic yards of carbon dioxide gas from Lake Nyos (a crater lake) in Cameroon killed an estimated 1700 people and thousands of cattle. Two years before, 37 people living near Lake Monoun (another crater lake) had also died suddenly, but the incident was covered up by the government. There was no electricity or telephone service in the area, so the incident was not widely known.
CO2 is colourless, odorless, and heavier than air. It travels low to the ground until it disperses. You wouldn’t even know it was there – you would just die.
This story keeps popping up, it has been mentioned a number of times on this site. CO2 leaking from a pipeline is at a high pressure. Do you know how they look for leaks? They fly along the route and look for dry ice formation. Due to the Joule-Thompson effect, pressurized CO2 leaking into the atmosphere rapidly cools and forms dry ice.
This is nuts! Producing oxygen from the atmosphere uses a large amount of electricity to liquefy the air and then fractionally distill it! That is why oxygen is quite expensive too, for welding or whatever. Local steelworks near me used to do oxygen steelmaking and the oxygen plant there used 50MW! This must be a wind-up, or “green” froth, or something similar. To burn 1kg of methane (natural gas) would need roughly 4kg of oxygen (simple chemistry), which would cost several times as much as the gas. Perhaps they have found a way to get the carbon out of CO2 which uses less energy than burning methane? That is energetically impossible.
The process is a bit more thermally efficient than gas gen.+carbon capture, but can pretty much guarantee to capture 100% of CO2 produced.
https://www.mdpi.com/2571-8797/1/1/22/htm
From what I’ve seen elsewhere a nominal 300MW plant only has about 170MW available for use, the rest drives the ASU (55MW for oxygen) and the rest provides power for compressors. The same source says said 300MW plant produces 2400Mt CO2 per day.
Of course it is not CO2 free, the CO2 still has to be stored somewhere. It’s only CO2 free in the same way that a Coal plant with a carbon capture plant tacked on is CO2 free. Well done, all compressed and pipeline ready, now where do you stick the end of the pipe!
WUWT got this one right. Whether you believe that AGW is real and real bad, or don’t, this is a the beginning of a Trumpian YUGE corporate welfare Queening. The $50/ton tax trickle up could be used almost any other way for better outcomes.
I blame my guys for this. Why is the government picking winning and losing carbon reduction technologies? If you don’t think that atmospheric [CO2] reduction is a good idea, then you and I don’t want your tax $ misspent on this. If you do think that atmospheric [CO2] reduction is a good idea – like me – then you and I STILL don’t want your tax $ misspent on this.
We should instead be fighting about the imposition of a sufficiently large carbon tax, equitably, regularly rebated to every US citizen, after paying out the carbon sequestered by projects not dependent on winner picking front end loaded tax schemes. Sequestration can then compete with use reduction to get where we want to go. Since the lowest quintile in western Europe lives longer than ours, is healthier than ours, and has more economic opportunity than ours, in spite of higher gas prices, please spare me the selective crocodile tears for US drivers. Put another way, since our /capita US total carbon footprint is highly income dependent, most po’ folks would make out from an equitable US carbon tax.
But what happens to all of the children if these monstrosities use up all of the oxygen?! Especially the vegan children because it sounds like there will be no more carbon dioxide for the plants! Those poor kids will starve while not being able to breathe. Oh no and oh my.
I suspect it won’t be “good enough” for many – it still uses NG which is evil.
There’s no doubt that burning natural gas with pure oxygen instead of air results in a gain in efficiency, due to avoiding the sensible heat required to heat up 78%+ of nitrogen in the air.
But there is the problem of separating oxygen from nitrogen in the air, which can be done using membranes or pressure-swing adsorption, but both processes require compression, which would consume some of the extra power generated.
The heat of combustion of methane (the major component of natural gas) generates about 50 MJ of heat per kg burned, so that a 250 MW turbine (at 100% efficiency) would burn 5 kg/s of methane, which consumes about 20 kg/s of pure oxygen, or about 7 m3/s at atmospheric pressure. This would require the separation of air at a rate of about 35 m3/s, or 126,000 m3/hr. Has anyone ever built an air separator at that rate?
Conventional natural-gas turbines (which burn natural gas in air) typically use a front-end compressor (which is driven by the turbine shaft) to compress cold air, which is then burned with natural gas, and the expanding hot gases drive the turbine. The turbine blades are built to withstand the temperatures produced by natural gas combustion in air, in which nitrogen absorbs about 80% of the heat produced.
If natural gas is burned in pure oxygen, the resulting combustion gases would be 2/3 H2O and 1/3 CO2, and would be much hotter than those from burning natural gas in air. What would be the cost of making turbine blades out of exotic materials that can resist temperatures of 1500 C or higher and the stresses of gas pressure against the blades?
If the hot, low-pressure gases from the turbine are used to generate steam (and more power), then the CO2 would have to be separated from the water vapor, which should be fairly easy using coolers after stages of compression to condense liquid water. Burning natural gas always produces the same amount of CO2, whether it is burned in air or pure oxygen. There would still be the power consumed by the compression of CO2, plus the power required to run the air separator, which would be subtracted from the power generated by the gas and steam turbines.
The only net advantage to using pure oxygen instead of air is that none of the energy generated is used to heat up nitrogen. This has to be balanced against the power requirement and cost of the air separator, and the necessity of more expensive turbine blades and other equipment downstream of the combustion chamber.
When I clicked on the link for “Full article here”, it only led to a tweet on Twitter, not exactly a “full article”. It would be interesting to see an energy balance and a cost analysis for this process.
Which requires energy to process the raw materials, fabricate the filters, and replace them periodically.
Once again, the proposed solution results in a reduced net efficiency, and they don’t bother to mention that the end-user will have to pay for making the oxygen, unless they can get someone to pay for the CO2, to cover the cost of the O2.
Made possible by the nearby oilfield that is purchasing the liquid CO2 for injection into the secondary oil recovery CO2 flooding that is being conducted to produce more oil from this old field. And, of course, the taxpayer’s subsidy money.
This area has high energy demand, anybody ever heard of the concept of air conditioning in Houston, and high volume secondary oil recovery projects that are are good fit for miscible CO2 flooding. A very, very unique set of circumstances that are unlikely to be replicated outside of an oilfield.
Petroleum engineers are badass!!!!
I think the acid test is the creation payback time. Fossil fuels can supply the energy to create itself…the equipment to mine, transport deploy to generation site, build plant, build supply system and IN ADDITION, supply enough energy to power the surrounding society. Panels fail that test. Windmills fail that test. Only fossil fuels and nuclear generation pass that test, for now. Until the next Big Thing, we should concentrate on conservation and efficiency. PS Getting the Third World out of mind-numbing poverty that a 24/7 100 watt bulb brings to an end should be humanity’s top priority
This just furthers the aim of the Progressives set to destroy the middle class. The net effect of this technology is nothing more than to triple or quadruple the cost of supplying a kwhr of electricity to the customer. It makes energy and everything else much more expensive and destroys the middle class. Likely half of the energy output goes into the oxygen system and the CO2 capture and storage. Then add in the much higher maintenance and equipment costs. Cheap and abundant energy is done.
There is another problem… they will have burn double the amount of gas to provide the same amount of electricity to the consumer. Half of what they burn goes into the O2/CO2 system.
This is a very good technology under the circumstances, in my opinion. If the comparison is with coal, then no, you can’t do better than coal for price and 24/365 consistency of output.
But the western world is not going back to coal as its primary source of electricity, let alone total energy. That ship has sailed.
The Allam cycle technology has the potential, once first base has been reached in terms of economies of scale, to match or even improve upon wind on a LCOE basis. Once you factor in the improvement on system costs overall due to the absence of intermittency, it ticks all the boxes.
As another commenter here has observed, the left won’t like it one little bit. And why would that be? Because it would shine a very bright searchlight on their real motives behind their enthusiasm for promoting their climate malarkey.
For that reason alone, I fully support this initiative (not that my support’s worth a bean, but a few million beans might make a difference in pushing back against Big Green and the WEF/Davos crowd).
Of course, the CO2 emitted in the process of concentrating O2 for the combustion phase is completely ignored, as is the risks of accidental release of their “pipeline ready” concentrated, pressurized CO2. Lake Nyos, anyone? Beuhler?
Pressurizing and storing CO2 in huge underground formations is beyond stupid.
So capital and high energy costs to produce a ton of oxygen. And you still have “pipeline ready” CO2 to dispose of. Which will go where? Likely this was funded by DoE and they’ll vent the CO2. Meanwhile customers will pay higher bills to fund the O2 plant. Stupid.