Carbon Capture for Gas Power Appears on the Horizon

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April 1, 2013

Carbon Capture for Gas Power Appears on the Horizon

By Thomas Overton
Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) has thus far been an issue mainly for coal plants as they struggle with
the means of complying with impending U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) carbon pollution
regulations. In fact, the EPA suggests that nearly all recently built combined cycle plants would meet the new
standard without further emission controls.
Few people, however, expect that to be the case forever, given the EPAs long practice of lowering emissions
limits over time. That means CCS may one day become necessary for gas-fired plants.
Two companies in the gas power business arent waiting for the go-ahead from the EPA.
Seattle-based Summit Power Group, which owns 12 simple and combined cycle plants as well as a portfolio of
wind and solar generation assets, is teaming up with global technology company The Linde Group to develop
commercial-scale natural gasfired power plants that will be able to capture up to 90% of the CO 2 that would
otherwise have been emitted.
In the U.S. and abroad, the electric power sector is making a dash for gas, said Donald Paul Hodel, Summits
chairman emeritus and former U.S. secretary of energy. Technology is ready to capture the CO2 that gas-fired
power plants produce.
Both companies are already active in developing power projects with CCS.
Summit is currently developing two major coal gasification projects that will employ CCS. The Texas Clean
Energy Project (TCEP), currently under development near Odessa, Texas, will be an integrated gasification
combined cycle facility that will supply CO2 for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) as well as urea for the fertilizer
market (Figure 1). Summit is partnering with Siemens and Selas Fluid Processing Corp., a Linde Group
subsidiary. The 400-MW project, which was selected by the Department of Energy (DOE) in 2009 for a $350
million cost-sharing award, is still completing financing.

1. Summit Power has several CCS projects under development. It plans to leverage its experience with the
Texas Clean Energy Project (an integrated gasification combined cycle facility), shown in this rendering, for
future natural gasfired plants. Courtesy: Summit Power

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Carbon Capture for Gas Power Appears on the Horizon

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Summits other CCS initiative, the Captain Clean Energy Project in the United Kingdom, is in the early planning
stages. The facility has been shortlisted for the UK Governments 1 billion CCS Commercialisation Programme,
and the project consortiumSummit, the UK National Grid, and UK oil and gas company Petrofacis in
negotiations with the Department of Energy and Climate Change before a final decision is made in 2013.
Linde is a major worldwide supplier of industrial, process and specialty gases, and gas processing, and has been
involved in CCS technology development for a number of years. In 2011, it was awarded a $15 million grant by
the DOE for the advancement of CCS technologies. A pilot CCS plant to be built in Wilsonville, Ala., is targeted
to be operational by early 2014. The facility will test new CO2 scrubbing solutions to reduce the energy
consumption and costs of advanced CCS systems for coal-fired plants. The Wilsonville facility is intended to
build on Lindes experience with a comparable project in Niederaussem, Germany.
Based on their previous cooperation (Linde is the long-term operations and maintenance provider to TCEP), the
two companies are now expanding their focus to natural gasbased CO2 capture. The project likely got a boost
on March 15, when the Obama administration released its Blueprint for a Clean and Secure Energy Future,
which included a $25 million prize for the first combined cycle plant to successfully integrate CCS.
Merely increasing reliance on natural gas is not a sufficient carbon-reduction strategy, said Dr. Aldo Belloni, a
member of Lindes Executive Board. It is still necessary, valuable, and eminently feasible to capture and
geologically sequester the carbon dioxide that natural gasfired plants would otherwise emit, just as it is with
coal-based plants.
The initiative envisions a combined cycle plant design with carbon capture producing approximately 250 MW and
capturing up to 750,000 tons of CO 2 annually. While power generation for utility use is part of the plan, Summit
and Linde are also eyeing the market for CO2 in determining locations for the plant, specifically EOR.
EOR takes advantage of crude oils miscibility with CO2, especially deep underground, where CO2 is in a
supercritical phase. This reduces the oils density, viscosity, and surface tension, allowing more oil to flow out of
the well. CO2 that comes to the surface with the produced oil is re-compressed and re-injected, ultimately
remaining trapped underground. The DOE estimates project that as much as 240 billion barrels of oil could be
produced with next-generation EOR techniques in the U.S., assuming sufficient CO2 is available.
In many U.S. oilfields, the volume of CO2 that would be produced by the Summit-Linde plants could be used to
produce an additional 1.5 million to 2.5 million barrels of oil per year. The hopes are that revenue earned from
the productive use of captured CO2 will reduce and possibly eliminate the environmental cost premium that CCS
imposes.
Summit and Linde have identified several suitable U.S. locations where the electricity could be sold to utilities
and large consumers, and suitable geological sequestration sites are available for the injection of CO2
underground.
Competitively priced electric power is, in the end, a necessity, said Hodel. But so is clean and environmentally
acceptable electric power. Working with Linde, we believe we can and will be able to achieve both, not just from
coal gasification projects but also from gas-fired power plants.
The companies plan to announce their first project later this year.
Thomas W. Overton, JD is POWERs gas technology editor. Follow Tom on Twitter @thomas_overton.
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