Petra Nova CCS project inaugurated

On 13 April 2017, US secretary of energy Rick Perry and governor of Texas Greg Abbott joined the chief executive officers of the Petra Nova carbon capture and enhanced oil recovery system partners – NRG Energy, JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration Corporation and Hilcorp Energy – to celebrate successful operation of the facility.

Petra Nova, a 50-50 joint venture by NRG Energy and JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration, captures more than 90% of CO2 from a 240 MW equivalent slipstream of flue gas off an existing coal-fueled electrical generating unit at the WA Parish power plant and uses it to increase oil production at a mature oil field owned by Petra Nova and Hilcorp Energy.

The plant uses a proven carbon capture process jointly developed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Kansai Electric Power Co, employing KS-1 solvent for the CO2 absorption and desorption.

It is the world’s largest carbon capture system retrofitted onto an existing coal plant (larger than Sask Power’s Boundary Dam (110 MWe, net 139 MWe gross), the first commercial scale CCS project at a power plant).

The Petra Nova facility was constructed on-time and on-budget and commenced operations at the end of 2016, since when it has delivered more than 300 000 tons of CO2 to the West Ranch oil field for enhanced oil recovery, with the capability of capturing over 5000 tons of CO2 per day.

Over the next few years, oil production at the field is estimated to increase from approximately 300 barrels per day before beginning EOR operations to up to 15000 barrels per day using captured CO2.