Efforts begin to sequester carbon dioxide

Editor’s note: The original online version of this story was previously posted.

Over the next five years at least half a million tons of carbon dioxide will be injected into rock deep underneath the Mountaineer power plant near New Haven, W.Va. Although that is less than 0.00001 percent of global emissions of the greenhouse gas and less than 2 percent of the plant’s own CO2 output, the sequestration, which began in September, marks the first commercial demonstration of the only available technological fix for the carbon problem of coal-fired power plants, one that many coal facilities around the world hope to emulate.

 Carbon Capture Unit at the Mountaineer power plant near New Haven, W.Va., uses chilled ammonia scrubbers to grab carbon dioxide from coal burning for subsequent storage underground.
Courtesy of American Electric Power

Coal accounts for roughly 50 percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. and as much as 75 percent of the electricity generated by American Electric Power, says Nick Akins, executive vice president of generation at the utility, which owns Mountaineer. The plant can pump out 1,300 megawatts of electricity, making it one of the single largest coal-fired power plants in the U.S. and a leading source of CO2 emissions. (The top emitters of global-warming pollution—China and the U.S.—burn nearly four billion tons of the dirty black rock a year.)

As a result, everyone from coal companies to environmental groups have identified carbon capture and storage, or CCS, as critical in enabling significant and rapid cuts in greenhouse gases. But there have been only a handful of demonstrations of the technology to capture the gas and, outside of using CO2 to pump more oil out of the ground, even fewer attempts to store it.

To capture CO2 from its smokestacks, Mountaineer will employ so-called chilled ammonia technology, which relies on ammonium carbonate chemistry to pull CO2 out of the exhaust gases. (The other two basic capture technologies either burn coal in pure oxygen to produce a CO2-rich emissions stream or siphon off the CO2 made during the gasification of coal.)

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