NRG recently announced that they are going to initiate a carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) project (in cooperation with Powerspan Corp.) at their WA Parish plant in Texas. The project, projected to be online in 2012, will capture a portion of the CO2 in the flue gases from one of the eight units operating at the facility, roughly a million tons per year, or about 5% of the plants total CO2 emissions. They’ll use a process developed by Powerspan that uses ammonia to absorb the CO2, a change from the typical methods employed which use amine.

The carbon capture part of the CCS equation appears to be at hand. What is not solved is the S or the sequestration. As of now, the plant doesn’t really have a home for the captured CO2, although NRG officials are hopeful that one of the ancient oil fields in the area could use the CO2 as part of a tertiary oil recovery project. I’m certain that they have done their homework and are aware of potential candidate fields for CO2 flood; however, these types of projects are extremely expensive and few fields can generate enough incremental production to offset the infrastructure costs associated with CO2 flooding - including new well tubulars/downhole equipment, distribution and gathering pipelines, compression, and the CO2 stripping facilities that will have to be built in order to remove the injected CO2 from the production stream in order to make the products saleable.

I’ve got a particular interest in this deal, aside from the fact that it involves energy and technology. This is the plant that keeps me awake at night. Its not because I worry about it being praticularly dangerous (although it has historically been listed in the top ten of the dirtiest plants in the US). No, I haven’t really given that much thought. What bothers me about this particular facility is that it is pretty much in my backyard and the coal trains that feed this monster (more than 3500 mw, earning it second place on the list of the largest power plants in the US) run 24 hours a day, bringing in somewhere between 300-400 coal cars every day. The tracks are a mile and a half from my house, but when they blow their air horns, it sounds as if they are about to run through my garage.

Given the plant’s proximity to my house, I’m a little concerned about this new ammonia based technology. I need to read more about it, but at first blush, I think I have reason to be concerned if a valve, pipe, or rupture plate were to fail. Ammonia clouds are particularly nasty things to have blow your way.

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