"dave o'leary" dave.oleary@MDSIERRA.ORG 1/26/2010 10:23 AM >>>
Here is a link to an interview about AEP's pilot CCS facility in West Virginia. I pasted in the link to the full interview, along with a few selected comments from the AEP spokesperson.
David O'Leary Chapter Conservation Chair Sierra Club - Maryland Chapter
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http://www.bgrncol.com/status-report-on-the-operation-of-the-largest-operati...
Status Report on the Operation of the Largest Operating Coal-Fired CCS Plant in the U.S. Published on January 25th, 2010 in Interviews
American Electric Power, one of the largest electric utilities in the United States, started operating a 20 MW coal-fired Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) plant in September 2009. It is currently the largest facility of its kind in the United States, and the success or failure of this operation will likely have a major impact on the viability of this technology and the future role of coal in the U.S.'s and the world's low carbon emissions future, as well as impact the adoption rates of nuclear and renewables. In this follow-up interview, Nick Akins, the Executive Vice President of Power Generation for American Electric Power (AEP), speaks about the status of the operation and what it means for scale-up timetables and ultimate price and energy penalties that affect the viability of coal-fired CCS.
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The 20-megawatt CCS installation at our Mountaineer Plant in New Haven, W.Va., started capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) Sept. 1, 2009, and we began injecting CO2 into the geologic formations Oct. 1, 2009.
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we are in the range of the 15 to 30 percent energy penalty that we were expecting. It is important to realize that this is a process validation installation, so it is not optimized for efficiency, but rather for flexibility to adjust process conditions.
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We were extremely pleased to be notified Dec. 4, 2009, that we were selected to receive $334 million in funding through the Department of Energy's Clean Coal Power Initiative to scale-up the CCS process at our Mountaineer Plant. We plan to build the 235-megawatt installation of the chilled ammonia carbon capture and storage process at Mountaineer and expect it to be operational in 2015. At this scale, we will capture and store approximately 1.5 million metric tones of CO2 annually.
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We anticipate retrofitting up to 75 percent of our existing 25,600 megawatts of coal-fueled generation with CCS technology by 2025 or 2030. The plants we retrofit will be our largest, most efficient generating units that have already been retrofit to reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and mercury. The remaining 25 percent of our existing coal-fired generating fleet likely will be retired.
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