News

Chu: $2.4 Billion of Stimulus Funds to Accelerate Deployment of CCS

U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu on Friday announced at the National Coal Council that $2.4 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be used to expand and accelerate the commercial deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.

The remaining $1 billion of the $3.4 billion congressionally approved “clean coal“ funds has been set aside for the Illinois FutureGen project and will be used “if the Secretary decides to pursue the … project,” Department of Energy (DOE) spokeswoman Stephanie Mueller told Dow Jones Newswires on Friday.

“To prevent the worst effects of climate change, we must accelerate our efforts to capture and store carbon in a safe and cost-effective way. This funding will both create jobs now and help position the United States to lead the world in CCS technologies, which will be in increasing demand in the years ahead,” Secretary Steven Chu told the council.

The department pasted Notices of Intent (NOI) to issue this funding, supporting the following initiatives.

Clean Coal Power Initiative: $800 million will be used (PDF) to expand the DOE’s Clean Coal Power Initiative, which provides government co-financing for new coal technologies that can help utilities cut sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury pollutants from power plants. The new funding will allow researchers broader CCS commercial-scale experience by expanding the range of technologies, applications, fuels, and geologic formations that are tested.
Industrial Carbon Capture and Storage: $1.52 billion will be used for a two-part competitive solicitation for large-scale CCS from industrial sources. The industrial sources include, but are not limited to, cement plants, chemical plants, refineries, steel and aluminum plants, manufacturing facilities, and petroleum coke–fired and other power plants. The second part of the solicitation will include innovative concepts for beneficial CO2 reuse (CO2 mineralization, algae production, etc.) and CO2 capture from the atmosphere. In addition, two existing industrial and innovative reuse projects, previously selected via competitive solicitations, will be expanded to accelerate scale-up and field testing:

  • Ramgen Modification ($20 million): Funding will allow the industrial-sized scale-up and testing of an existing advanced CO2 compression project with the objective of reducing time to commercialization, technology risk, and cost. Work on this project will be done in Bellevue, Wash. See POWER‘s upcoming June issue for a review of the Ramgen CO2 compression technology.
  • Arizona Public Service Modification ($70.6 million): Funding will permit the existing algae-based carbon mitigation project to expand testing with a coal-based gasification system. The goal is to produce fuels from domestic resources while reducing atmospheric CO2 emissions. The overall process will minimize production of carbon dioxide in the gasification process to produce a substitute natural gas (SNG) from coal. The host facility for this project is the Cholla Power Plant located in Holbrook, Ariz.

Geologic Sequestration Training and Research: $20 million will be used (PDF) to educate and train a future generation of geologists, scientists, and engineers with skills and competencies in geology, geophysics, geomechanics, geochemistry, and reservoir engineering disciplines needed to staff a broad national CCS program. This program will emphasize advancing educational opportunities across a broad range of colleges and universities for minority students and will use the DOE’s University Coal Research Program as the model for implementing the program.

Geologic Sequestration Site Characterization: $50 million will fund (PDF) a competitive solicitation to characterize a minimum of 10 geologic formations throughout the U.S. Projects will be required to complement and build upon the existing characterization base created by the DOE’s Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnerships, looking at broadening the range and extent of geologic basins that have been studied to date. The goal of this effort is to accelerate the determination of potential geologic storage sites.

Last week, the Office of Fossil Energy released the Storage of Captured Carbon Dioxide Beneath Federal Lands (PDF)—a supplement to the DOE’s Carbon Sequestration Atlas of the United States and Canada that was issued in November 2008. The report estimates and characterizes the storage potential that lies beneath some of the more than 400 million acres of federal land available for lease. Estimated at between 126 to 375 billion metric tons of CO2, the majority of this storage potential (about 85%) is located west of the Mississippi River, where most of the leasable federal acreage (92%) is found.

“This report builds on last year’s carbon sequestration atlas and further bolsters our efforts to develop America’s carbon sequestration capabilities,” said Dr. Victor Der, Acting Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy. ”The availability of Federal lands, in addition to private sites, could provide enormous potential resources to sequester carbon dioxide in the future.”

In assessing the potential for storage beneath federal lands, the report addresses issues such as federal control, location of emission sources, and pipeline rights-of-way, as well as laws and regulations relevant to federal leasing. Last year’s atlas addressed similar issues regarding privately owned acreage capable of storing an estimated 3,500 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide.

Source: DOE, Dow Jones Newswires

SHARE this article