Perhaps not altogether surprisingly it is proving much more difficult and taking rather longer than initially expected to get carbon capture and storage demonstration projects off the ground, the cancellation of AEP’s Mountaineer scale-up project in the USA, as reported in last month’s issue, being just one of a number of recent casualties. But one proposed major CCS plant that seems to be hanging on there in the USA, at least for the time being, is Summit Power’s IGCC based Texas Clean Energy Project (TCEP), to be sited at Penwell, a former Futuregen location. In fact it could be said that it is the only large scale planned CCS facility that appears to be making any progress in the USA currently – although the small matter of achieving financial close remains to be finalised.
As well as having a mind boggling amount of government funding (at least to people outside the USA) – no less than $450 million from the US Department of Energy – there are, in the words of Donald Hodel, chairman of Summit Power (and former US secretary of energy), “sales commitments in place for all three of TCEP’s main commercial products – electric power, urea for fertiliser and CO2 for enhanced oil recovery.” And, as Hodel says, this is “obviously key to getting this project underway.”
There is what is described as a “15 year” carbon dioxide sales agreement in place with Whiting Petroleum Corporation, which has undertaken to buy 80 million ft3 of compressed carbon dioxide per day from TCEP, about 60% of the plant’s projected output, during the first five years of operation, with gradually declining amounts and an option to extend the purchases after that. The carbon dioxide, captured by the Rectisol process, will be used for enhanced oil recovery in the Permian Basin. The power purchase agreement is with CPS Energy, stipulating 200 MW over 25 years, while “100% of the urea”, up to 750 000 t/y, has been “sold to a major urea distributor” (as yet unnamed).
This polygeneration, multi-revenue-stream approach, combined with, it has to be said, generous government subsidy, would appear to be the only way of making the economics of large-scale CCS demonstration stack up, at least in the USA.
The speed with which the Chinese seem to be embracing cleaner power generation technology is truly astonishing, particularly when you consider that a very short time ago many in the West thought they had little interest in this kind of thing and needed our help. A couple of years ago in these pages we noted that the average efficiency of coal plants in China was exceeding that in Europe and the USA. Two recently published statistics are equally remarkable. According to the World Wind Energy Association, China added 8 GW of wind capacity in the first six months of this year, taking its installed capacity to 53 GW, the first country to pass the 50 GW mark. And according to FGD World Markets, a publication put out by the McIlvaine Company, China had installed flue gas desulphurisation (FGD) systems on 532 000 MW of its coal fired generation capacity as of the end of 2010 (75% of total capacity of 707 000 MW), compared with less than 200 000 MW of FGD in the USA (around 60% of capacity). To put this is perspective, no other country in the world has more than 50 000 MW of FGD, according to FGD World Markets.
New Chinese standards to take effect on 1 January 2012 will limit sulphur emissions in populated areas to 100 mg/Nm3, compared with the current general standard of 400 mg/Nm3, according to McIlvaine. Furthermore, China is “investing more in NOx reduction than any other country” and “has now targeted mercury.”
“Contrary to popular belief, China is ahead of the US in cleaning up its air emissions from coal-fired power plants”, concludes McIlvaine. It is hard to disagree. The Chinese will also be hoping that their choice of materials for FGD systems proves better than that in the USA, where very serious corrosion problems have been encountered (see pp 16-19, MPS, October 2011).
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