Secretary Chu Announces Up To $154 Million for NRG Energy's Carbon Capture and Storage Project ...

March 9, 2010

Secretary Chu Announces Up To $154 Million for NRG Energy's Carbon Capture and Storage Project in Texas

Funding will help demonstrate advances in clean coal efforts

Washington — U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced today that a project with NRG Energy has been selected to receive up to $154 million, including funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Located in Thompsons, TX, the post-combustion capture and sequestration project will demonstrate advanced technology to reduce emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. It will also assist with enhanced oil recovery efforts from a nearby oil field.

“Advancing our carbon capture and storage technology will create new jobs in America and reduce our carbon pollution output,” said Secretary Chu. “It’s another example of our country’s innovation at work.”

The NRG Energy project was selected under the third round of the Clean Coal Power Initiative (CCPI), a cost-shared collaboration between the federal government and private industry to demonstrate low-emission carbon capture and storage technologies in advanced coal-based, power generation. The goal of CCPI is to accelerate the readiness of advanced coal technologies for commercial deployment, ensuring that the United States has clean, reliable, and affordable electricity and power.

NRG will construct a 60 megawatt carbon capture demonstration facility at the company’s W.A. Parish Unit 7 in Thompsons, Texas. The 6-year project will demonstrate an innovative integration of several important advances in carbon capture and sequestration technologies, including-

• Fluor’s advanced Econamine FG PlusSM carbon capture process, using several different novel amine solvents.


• Ramgen’s advanced carbon dioxide compression system.


• The integration of highly efficient co-generation to provide the necessary steam and electricity.


• Enhanced oil recovery sequestration in one of the Texas Gulf Coast oilfields near the Parish plant.

The project will show that post-combustion carbon capture applied to existing plants can be done economically, especially when the plant has the opportunity to sequester carbon dioxide in nearby oilfields.

The U.S. Department of Energy will provide up to $154 million in federal funds, which will be matched by NRG Energy.

Media contact(s):
(202) 586-4940

March 9, 2010 | 4 comments

Smokestash Industry: ARPA-E Seeks Breakthroughs in Carbon Capture Technology

Humans can capture and release CO2 efficiently, so why can't power plants?

By David Biello

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Research engineer Harry Cordatos and his colleagues at United Technologies Corp. (UTC) are working on just such a system—and have garnered funding from the U.S. Department of Energy's new ARPA-E program. After all, UTC subsidiary Hamilton Sundstrand has been making CO2 capture units for the space program since the 1960s with different technology. But carbonic anhydrase "captures 600 molecules every second," Cordatos said at the ARPA-E summit in Washington, D.C., last week. "To take this enzyme out of the body is challenging. Our bodies continuously regenerate the enzyme because it degrades."

So Cordatos and UTC's idea is not to use the enzyme itself, but to master its chemistry and "use it in the unnatural environment of power plant flue gas," Cordatos said. The key appears to be a single zinc atom that sits at the core of the enzyme, which resembles a pyramid in structure. That structure allows the carbonic anhydrase to grip the CO2 "not too loose and not too tight," Cordatos explained, which is critical for efficiently capturing and then releasing the greenhouse gas.

UTC is not alone in this pursuit. In the ARPA-E program alone, four of the 37 funded developing technologies concerned researching more energy-efficient ways to capture the CO2 in a fossil fuel–fired power plant's flue gas. Chemist David Moore at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., employs electricity itself to charge absorbent materials for CO2 capture. Nalco Co., is developing an "electrochemical platform" to do the job. And physicist Olgica Bakajin of Hayward, Calif.–based Porifera, Inc., plans to use membranes composed of carbon nanotubes to separate CO2 from the other gases—using carbon to capture carbon.

"We need to develop the technologies that enable us to use our fossil fuels in a clean way," Secretary of Energy Steven Chu told ScientificAmerican.com at the conference. "This is something you don't solve in five years, 10 years. It will take a half century to get our carbon emissions down to where we need to go to protect the climate." At the same time, the U.S. will require a steady supply of electricity which, today, means coal burning or nuclear power, Chu said.

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