Appalachian Power’s Mountaineer Power Plant, with its new carbon sequestration plant, in Mason County. Gazette photo by Lawrence Pierce.

My buddy Paul Nyden tagged along yesterday when some West Virginia lawmakers toured the “carbon capture and storage” project over at American Electric Power subsidiary Appalachian Power’s Mountaineer Power Plant in New Haven, W.Va.

From his story, it sounds like leading lawmakers think the success of CCS projects like this — and the ability to deploy them widely on coal-fired power plants — is a done deal.

For example, Senate President Earl Ray Tomblin, D-Logan, said:

There is talk in every place in West Virginia and around the world about pollution control. This shows West Virginia is a leader in cleaning up the atmosphere from carbon dioxide.

The rose-colored glasses view is bipartisan, as we see from the comments of Senate Minority Leader Don Caruth, R-Mercer:

I am very impressed with the opportunity to visit a plant like this. What a wonderful opportunity this is. When you passed a plant like this 25 or 30 years ago, you saw it spewing and gases and smoke…. This is a wonderful day for West Virginia.

Of course, Coal Tattoo readers know better. They understand that CCS is a very long way from being deployed on the scale needed to allow coal to be a part of a carbon-constrained energy future, and that — most importantly — we just don’t know for sure if this technology is going to work. Read previous posts on this topic here. And remember that some analysts are raising questions about whether we’ll still have much economically mineable coal left by the time CCS is up and running on a large scale.

Gov. Joe Manchin has been among the lead cheerleaders for coal and CCS, but he’s repeatedly made it sound like this is something easy and that’s ready to just stick onto power plants across the country. When the state approved a permit for the Mountaineer Plant’s test project, for example, Manchin declared:

I’ve always said that we need to discover modern and more environmentally friendly ways to use the tremendous resource we have in West Virginia coal. That technology is here, today, and we are working hard to find even more innovative energy solutions that create jobs for West Virginians, while also protecting our environment.

Not surprisingly, there was no mention from the governor that this project is a very small test that will capture a tiny portion of the plant’s carbon dioxide emissions …

To their credit, AEP officials at yesterday’s tour appeared to try to caution about the hurdles that CCS faces. As Dr. Nyden reported:

Gary Spitznogle, an engineer overseeing development of the new facility, called it “one of the first efforts to develop technology to capture carbon dioxide efficiently from coal-fired plants.”

I posted last week about testimony Spitznogle delivered to Congress offering warnings and straight talk about CCS, including this:

The Congress and indeed all Americans must come to recognize the gigantic undertaking and significant sacrifices that this enterprise is likely to require. It is unrealistic to assume, and wrong to argue, that the market will magically respond simply by the imposition of stringent CO2 controls on our economy.

Today’s Washington Post recounted some of the issues that must be resolved if CCS is going to be part of the solution to global warming:

– The huge carbon capture and storage devices are hugely expensive, too. AEP executives estimate that the cost of carbon capture for a modest-size coal plant of about 235 megawatts would start at $700 million. That works out to about $100 for a ton of carbon dioxide, far above the projections made by the Environmental Protection Agency about prices under a cap-and-trade scheme similar to one passed by the House in June. MIT put the cost of carbon capture and storage at $50 to $70 a ton. (The Waxman-Markey bill would give the first six gigawatts of plants — equal to around seven average-sized plants — a $90 per ton subsidy in the form of free allowances.)

– Capture and storage devices also require large amounts of energy. The Alstom approach sucks up about 15 percent of the power plant’s energy output; other processes use as much as 30 percent. That means the utility must purchase other energy sources to cover the shortfall. (The energy lost is part of the $700 million cost, AEP executives said.)

– Storage carries its own challenges. This involves pumping the carbon dioxide into the ground, a way of sweeping coal’s harmful byproduct under the Earth’s rug — forever. That can’t be done just anywhere. Most of the Earth’s rug has holes; it is too porous to keep carbon dioxide bottled up.

– Varun Rai, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Environmental Science and Policy, says that there is a “disconnect” between “what is happening and what is needed by 2030.” He said that the world will need to capture and store 1.5 billion to 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2025. How big is that? According to the International Carbon Bank and Exchange, a private service provider for carbon trading, a new VW Beetle driven about 12,000 miles a year will generate enough carbon dioxide to fill up the Washington Monument three times. The United States produces enough carbon dioxide to cover the nation’s entire land mass with a layer one foot deep every year. Greenpeace, a foe of coal-fired power, says that to sequester all the emissions from coal-fired plants, the volume of CO2 would be equal to 28 million train cars a day, or a Grand Canyon every 15 days.

– Legal quagmires also lurk. Someone will need to take responsibility for monitoring and maintaining storage sites that will have to last hundreds of years, said Tombari, far “beyond the likely lifespan of any corporation.” And who will pay for that? If consumers pay a fee for storage, that fee will grow over time, and tomorrow’s consumers might end up paying big legacy costs to make sure they contain the emissions of today’s consumers. Many companies want the government to relieve them of any liability for unexpected consequences. (A naturally occurring “burp” of carbon dioxide from a Cameroon lake in 1986 killed hundreds of people.)

In summary:

Yet carbon capture and storage remains the elusive holy grail of the coal industry, an idea that could contain the damage inflicted by coal-burning power plants but a technology that remains expensive, energy intensive and largely untested. Even optimists say it will not be commercially available for another six to 10 years. Pessimists say it might take much longer, and may never be ready for widespread use without attaching a punishingly high price to carbon. 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12, 2009 at 10:57 am and is filed under CCS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.