Boosts for Carbon Capture Projects in Texas, UK, Norway, Australia, and Italy

The week brought news of key alliances around the world concerning important fossil fuel–fired projects with carbon capture potential.

Tenaska Selects Fluor as EPC Contractor for Texas CCS Project

Tenaska said on Thursday it had selected Fluor Corp. as its engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contractor for the proposed $3.5 billion Tenaska Trailblazer Energy Center in Sweetwater, Texas. If built, the project could be the first conventional commercial coal-fired power plant in the U.S. The 600-MW plant is designed to capture 85% to 90% of CO₂ emissions using supercritical steam, pulverized coal technology. The CO₂ will then be provided for use in enhanced oil recovery and geologic storage.

Tenaska said it would sign an EPC contract with Fluor after the engineering phase of the project ends in 2010. Expected to last about a year, that phase will produce a preliminary design as well as provide a realistic project cost estimate. The results will be a factor in Tenaska’s final decision on whether to proceed with construction of the Trailblazer project.

The plant is in “an advanced stage of development,” Tenaska said. The company has acquired all necessary property and signed tax abatement agreements with Nolan County and the Nolan County Hospital District. Trailblazer has even received a draft air permit from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and has received a screening study from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.

The Texas Legislature, in the session just concluded, helped advance the prospects for Trailblazer development by passing progressive incentives and a regulatory framework to attract capital-intensive clean energy projects to Texas, including a grant to help fund front end engineering and design studies for carbon-capturing energy facilities.

If Tenaska proceeds with the project, construction could begin as early as next year, with operation commencing in 2015.

E.ON Selects MHI’s CO₂ Recovery Technology for UK Demonstration Project

Germany’s E.ON on Thursday selected a CO₂ capture technology developed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) for its application to the UK government’s carbon capture and storage (CCS) demonstration competition. MHI and partner Foster Wheeler Energy will carry out the pre-front-end engineering design of a CO₂ capture plant planned for a 1,600-MW supercritical pressure coal-fired power station proposed for E.ON UK’s Kingsnorth Power Station in Kent.

E.ON is in competition with two other contenders—ScottishPower and Peel Power—in the UK’s contest to secure funding for a commercial-scale CCS project. Results are expected to be announced this summer.

If E.ON wins the competition, the company’s planned CCS facility at Kingsnorth could replace the station’s existing coal-fired units, making it the first coal-fired power generation plant to be built in the UK in 30 years. E.ON plans to separate, recover, and compress the CO₂ from the coal-fired flue gas and to store it within a depleted gas reservoir in the southern North Sea in collaboration with Tullow Oil plc, a UK oil company.

MHI’s CO₂ recovery technology, the KM-CDR process, uses the company’s proprietary KS-1 solvent for CO₂ absorption and desorption, which MHI and the Kansai Electric Power Co. jointly developed. MHI’s KM-CDR process requires considerably lower energy consumption than other technologies, and its performance has been highly evaluated. To date MHI has delivered or provided the technology to nine commercial plants for CO₂ recovery from natural gas–fired flue gas, of which five are already online.

With respect to CO₂ recovery from coal-fired flue gas—which contains more impurities—MHI is in the stage of confirming the technology for commercialization. MHI has already successfully conducted small-scale demonstration testing for CO₂ recovery from coal-fired flue gas at 10 tons/day, from 2006 through 2008.
 

Alstom Signs EPC for StatoilHydro’s Mongstad Project

Alstom has signed an EPC contract with Norwegian state-owned energy company StatoilHydro on behalf of the partners of the European CO₂ Technology Centre Mongstad (TCM) for a chilled ammonia (carbonate) CO₂ capture plant at TCM in Norway. The demonstration plant, due to begin operations in 2011, will be the first one of its kind using this technology to treat flue gas from a gas-fired power plant.

StatoilHydro is the operator of the project and has signed the EPC contract on behalf of the TCM’s three partners: Gassnova SF, StatoilHydro ASA, and A/S Norske Shell. Alstom’s chilled ammonia post-combustion technology is expected to capture CO₂ from the flue gases of a combined heat and power plant at Mongstad. It will also treat flue gases from a petroleum processing plant at the nearby Mongstad refinery, which has a CO₂ output equal to that of a coal-fired power plant. The test results will consequently be of relevance to both gas- and coal-fired power plants, Alstom said in a press release on Friday.

The demonstration TCM facility at Mongstad is being designed to capture up to 100,000 metric tons of CO₂. Alstom’s chilled ammonia technology will have the capacity to capture 80,000 metric tons per year, the company said. The facility will test amine technology as well as carbonate technology. TCM partners earlier this year signed a separate EPC contract for an amine plant with Aker Clean Carbon.

“The main goal of testing chilled ammonia is to qualify the technology for the large-scale treatment of flue gases, while at the same time developing a cost- and energy-efficient solution,” said Tore Amundsen, the managing director of TCM. “That is why the contract signed with Alstom today is an important step forward for TCM.”

Alstom’s chilled ammonia technology is gaining steam. In recent months, the company has announced agreements with American Electric Power, The Dow Chemical Company, E.ON, PGE Elektrownia, StatoilHydro, Total, TransAlta, Vattenfall, and We Energies to test CO₂ capture technologies in Europe and North America. To date, Alstom has started operation at several CO₂ capture pilot projects, including projects with We Energies in the U.S., E.ON in Sweden, and Vattenfall in Germany.

MHI, Mitsubishi Corp. to Provide Feasibility Studies for Australia’s ZeroGen Dem

MHI and Mitsubish Corp. on Monday agreed to provide a feasibility study for Australia’s planned ZeroGen project, an integrated gasification combined-cycle (IGCC) power plant and CCS facility. The 530-MW ZeroGen project is slated to go online in 2015.
 
The project, planned to be built in Queensland and wholly owned by the Queensland State Government, will capture and sequester CO₂ in deep subsurface brine aquifers. Mitsubishi Corp. will coordinate the overall project. In that capacity, it will be responsible for the selection of potential sites in Queensland both for the IGCC plant and for a carbon transport and storage area, as well as for handling infrastructure, coal supply, stakeholder engagement, and environmental studies.
 
Japan, including MHI, has been seeking to introduce IGCC and CCS technologies to the global market while Australia has been looking to make effective use of coal—the country’s largest export commodity—and to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
 
Mitsubishi Corp. has considerable coal interests in Australia. It was a founding member of the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute (GCCSI), an organization established by the Australian federal government to support commercialization of CCS. MHI’s IGCC system is based on air-blown gasification technology, which the company has been refining at a 250-MW IGCC demonstration plant in Iwaki, Japan. That plant has already completed more than 2,000 hours of continuous operation, MHI said.

IFP and ENEL to Test Flue Gas Scrubbing Technology in Brindisi

French energy research firm IFP and Italy’s ENEL on Monday signed a memorandum of understanding to test IFP’s first-generation postcombustion capture process on a pilot unit that ENEL will build at its coal-fired power plant in Brindisi, Italy.

IFP’s process consists of flue gas scrubbing technology using chemical solvents. A pilot unit at European Castor project at Esbjerg in Denmark had already demonstrated the feasibility, reliability, and efficiency of this solvent-based CO₂ capture technology on an industrial scale, IFP said. The firm has continued to optimize the process by reducing the ammonia content of the flue gases and cutting operating costs. The test at ENEL’s plant is expected to demonstrate these improvements.

ENEL plans to build a slip-stream pilot plant at the Brindisi power station. The pilot will be in operation by early 2010 to allow validation of the process’s basic principles and assessment of the scaling-up criteria, and will be used to compare a range of CO₂ capture technologies. Following a preliminary assessment, IFP and ENEL partners may also consider testing second-generation processes currently being developed by IFP.

Sources: Tenaska, MHI, Mitsubishi Corp. E.ON, StatoilHydro Alstom, IFP, ENEL