Carbon Capture Pilot Test Declared a Success
EPRI's Senior Vice President Hank Courtright joined We Energies Chairman, President and CEO Gale Klappa, and Alstom U.S. President Pierre Gauthier at an October 8 press conference to announce results of a successful CO2 capture project. The project confirmed the predicted performance of Alston’s advanced chilled ammonia system, demonstrating more than 90% CO2 capture from the flue stream at We Energies’ Pleasant Prairie Power Plant in Wisconsin. The project also achieved key research metrics around hours of operation, ammonia release, and CO2 purity.
"As we move toward a carbon-constrained world, the development of cost-effective carbon capture technology is one of the biggest, most important challenges facing our industry," Klappa said. "Over the next decade, we simply must perfect and deploy systems that will capture carbon and allow power producers the world over to meet our energy needs. This project has laid the foundation for the next steps in this important research."
In successfully achieving all its testing metrics, the project demonstrated the fundamental viability of the carbon capture technology in real-world conditions such as changes in temperature and humidity, the inevitable starts and stops of a large power plant and the environmental hurdles that go along with using any chemical process.
"This project is an important first step in answering a couple of challenges," Courtright said. "One is to de-carbonize the electricity sector. That's what we consider job one for electric companies, which then can help de-carbonize the rest of the economy, through changes in transportation and industrial and commercial uses, and at the same time keep the cost of electricity reasonable and the supply reliable going forward."
Lessons learned at Pleasant Prairie already provided critical information for efforts to scale up effective carbon capture and storage technologies for new power plants and for retrofit to existing plants. A scaled-up 20-megawatt (electric) capture system has been installed at American Electric Power's 1,300-megawatt Mountaineer Plant, where it will remove an estimated 90% of CO2 emissions from the flue gas stream it processes, capturing up to 100,000 metric tons of CO2 per year.
"This was a proof-of-concept project … and the technology was a great success," Gauthier said. "We demonstrated over 90% CO2 removal; very little of the ammonia was lost; the high purity of CO2 was achieved, and we demonstrated the system is reliable. Now we’re moving to the next step, and scaling up this project."
The Mountaineer project is one of two current or planned post-combustion carbon capture and storage (CCS) demonstrations for which EPRI formed an industry collaborative to support management of testing and evaluations. The EPRI collaborative will support the integration process/design of CO2 capture technologies and the monitoring and verification of CO2 storage, and it will assess the large-scale impacts of CO2 controls and storage on post-combustion coal-fueled generation. The data collected and analyzed by the collaborative will support efforts to advance CCS technologies to commercial scale and provide information to the public and industry on future electricity generation options.
EPRI is leading or supporting seven Industry Technology Demonstrations as part of its efforts to help develop a "full portfolio" of innovative technology approaches needed to make substantial CO2 emissions reductions while minimizing economic impacts.
