Gazette photo by Lawrence Pierce
The Obama administration is scheduled to announce early this afternoon that it is awarding American Electric Power $334 million in federal “stimulus” funding to expand its carbon capture and storage test project at the Mountaineer Plant in Mason County, W.Va.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu is expected to join Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and Gov. Joe Manchin to make the announcement in a conference call with the media.
AEP’s Mountaineer Plant CCS project is among the most important tests of technology aimed at controlling greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. But, the current test deals with an emissions stream equivalent to only 20 megawatts of the 1,300-megawatt plant. The federal funding would cover about half of the costs of expanding AEP’s chilled ammonia carbon capture process to cover the equivalent of 230 megawatts of the plant. (Still less than 20 percent of the overall facility).
DOE is awarding the money as part of the latest “Clean Coal Power Initiative” funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Updated:
Here’s a link to the DOE news release, which includes a list of other funded projects and a link to the AEP press release.
I’ve also posted the audio of the conference call announcement:
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[...] Blogs @ The Charleston Gazette – » AEP to get federal funding for W.Va. CCS project blogs.wvgazette.com – view page – cached The Obama administration is scheduled to announce early this afternoon that it is awarding American Electric Power $334 million in federal “stimulus” funding to expand its carbon capture and… Read moreThe Obama administration is scheduled to announce early this afternoon that it is awarding American Electric Power $334 million in federal “stimulus” funding to expand its carbon capture and storage test project at the Mountaineer Plant in Mason County, W.Va. View page [...]
This is an example of the coal industry, and the electric power industry, “embracing the future,” as Senator Byrd called for.
I’ve noticed that on this blog, some people tend to express opposition to these kind of projects — even though the same people have expressed fulsome praise of Byrd’s recent remarks.
I’m suggesting that people consider holding off on expressing negativity about this AEP effort.
My reasoning is — we need climate legislation to save humanity. We need investment in CCS like this project to get climate legislation. We may well need CCS to save humanity, too.
So — let’s act accordingly. What do folks think?
[...] The Obama administration is scheduled to announce early this afternoon that it is awarding American Electric Power $334 million in federal “stimulus” funding to expand its carbon capture and storage test project at the Mountaineer Plant …Read Original Story: AEP to get federal funding for W.Va. CCS project – Charleston Gazette [...]
Thomas I’d just say that there are a significant group of people who believe that any technological solution to what is at essence a moral problem will be destined for failure and ideological disenfranchisement.
I agree with TR it will get the ball rolling in the right direction on cap and trade implementation. If we go ahead and fund these projects to upscale to large volume tests we should know in a short period of time if it is a viable technology. We had better hope it is viable technology because global warming is a worldwide problem I think we seem to forget sometimes. No matter if we stop burning coal immediately and start transitioning to wind, solar, nuclear , hydro, etc. the rest of the world won’t. Countries like Russia, China, various Old Soviet Republics, and some smaller and third world ones will not give up coal and no matter our best efforts it will not be enough to reduce the carbon in time. Also remember this technology can be applied to gas plants and gas is not as clean as you think, sure it burns cleaner but it also extracts carbon when harvested and that carbon is normally released into the air in the extraction process. In some European countries that have cap and trade laws now use sequestration to store that carbon in the ground that is pumped up with the gas to avoid the penalties for releasing it in to the air.
Jason, I completely agree with you that “there are a significant group of people who believe that any [yes, ANY] technological solution to what is at essence a moral problem will be destined for failure. . .. ”
But I’m not one of them.
Thomas if moral failings are the cause of these problems then how shall we solve them?
[...] here’s one thing I noticed … About a month ago, Obama Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced federal funding to help American Electric Power with its big carbon capture demonstration project over in Mason County. Chu held a conference [...]
[...] months ago, the Obama administration’s Department of Energy announced it was pumping $334 million in federal stimulus dollars into American Electric Power’s CCS [...]
[...] But the last time I checked, even with the $334 million in federal “stimulus” funding, the AEP project was only going to capture less than 20 percent of the Mountaineer Plant’s carb… [...]