A demonstration carbon-capture and storage plant (CCS) plant of 20MW capacity has been formally commissioned at New Haven, West Virginia,
The plant will separate out more than 100,000 tons of CO2 per year, which will be transported via pipeline to salt-water-bearing sandstone strata, for storage on site.
American Electric Power (AEP), the US electricity generating company, Alstom and RWE are implementing the CCS system at AEP’s 1,300MW Mountaineer hard-coal-fired power plant.
For its part, Alstom has developed the chilled ammonia process, which separates CO2 from flue gas after combustion. In a smaller pilot plant in Wisconsin, operated by Alstom and the Electric Power Research Institute, the chilled ammonia separation technology has proven itself over the past 18 months.
Now the plan is to demonstrate the process’ commercial-scale viability at Mountaineer. If this proves successful, AEP also plans to deploy the chilled ammonia process in a much larger follow-on project. Around 1.5m tons of CO2 should then be separated out each year.
Surely the best use of CO2 from these schemes is to pump into food greenhouses? This way the plants grow much faster, more cheaply and with less feeding and the CO2 gets turned naturally into O2. This is a win, win, win situation and we won’t need to worry about the low re-release of CO2 into the atmosphere in the future.
I can’t see a downside to this but pumping the gas into the ground could cause headaches for future generations.
Readers of The Engineer will want to see full test results of the plant now in operation giving all the salient facts so we can evaluate the relative efficiencies and cost.
It is time agricultural research stations evaluated plants and plant yields with varying amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere up to, say 500ppm. As above, let’s see the full test results. Since all animal life depends on plant life, the results could be of interest.
Finally, inform us what area of new forest equates to mitigating CO2 from a typical large power station on coal.
How very clever. Using vast amounts of energy to collect and store oxygen, with a bit of carbon. Doing this creates more CO2. Just continue this and the problem is solved. We will all be dead.
How much energy will be required to sequester the CO2? What is the public subsidy cost? With CO2 now being seen by many as a “good gas” and not the pollutant mainly responsible for ice cap and glacier melting (that would be carbon soot), why are we wasting resources to sequester it? On the contrary, Earth has lost 94% of its atmospheric CO2 over the period animals have been roaming the Earth. If we were to drop to about 97% loss, nearly all plants on Earth die from starvation. And reduction from today’s 380ppm would also reduce agricultural production around the globe, with resultant starvation within the 3rd world. Think about that.
So what is the chilled ammonia process?