Carbon capture

US energy provider NRG Energy plans to show that it can capture CO₂ from conventional coal-fuelled, electric power plants on a commercial scale.

To do so, it has teamed up with Portsmouth, New Hampshire-based Powerspan, developers of a post-combustion, regenerative process that uses an ammonia-based solution to capture CO₂ from the flue gas of a power plant and then release it in a form that is ready for safe transportation and permanent geological storage.

To date, CO₂ capture demonstrations on coal-fuelled power plants have been conducted only at pilot scale. The new demonstration system will be conducted at NRG's WA Parish plant near Sugar Land, Texas, one of the largest coal power stations in the US.

Once operational in 2012, it is expected to capture and sequester about one million tons of CO₂ annually - ranking it among the world's largest carbon capture projects and potentially the first to achieve commercial scale capture and sequestration from an existing coal-fuelled power plant.