Commercial IGCC Plants to be Built

Integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) electric power plants seem to becoming accepted as state of the art technology with the announcement that plants totaling 1,200 megawatts of capacity would be built.  IGCC plants convert coal into gas that is burned in turbines to power electric generators.  The process can significantly decreases emissions of nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, particulates and mercury to well below that required by environmental regulations.  The process reduces CO2 emissions by about 20%, but can isolate the CO2 into a separate stream if a means for disposal were available.  Sequestration technologies have not been demonstrated on a large scale.  The 2005 energy bill included funding for the Future Gen plant which incorporates sequestration technology. 

According to a 9/16/05 article in the Charleston Daily Mail an executive from Appalachian Power Company, a subsidiary of American Electric Power, said that he is convinced that a $1 billion, 1,200 MW IGCC plant will be constructed in West Virginia. 

Technocra ti tags: electrical generation, coal-fired power plants, integrated closed cycle gasification, >, energy

Comments

[JesseJenkins]

"Integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) electric power plants seem to becoming accepted as state of the art technology"

IGCC technology is not so 'state of the art' as many seem to think. In fact, the two technologies that it involves, namely gasification and sequestration, are already in wide use, (although not combined together). Petroleum refineries already use gasification technology to generate electricity and hydrogen from low-value leftovers from refining and General Electric boasts (as of 2003) that it has close to 400,000 hours of experience operationg turbines in gasification plants for refining giants including Exxon, Texaco and Shell. Gasification is also employed in the chemical industry which uses it to get power out of hazardous by-products. As of 2002, China's chemical industry has over 20 gasification power plants in operation, in consctruction stages or on order, according to Eric Larson of Princeton University.

Furthermore, sequestration has been routinely used in the oil industry where oil producers pump co2 (or water) into underperforming oil wells to create more pressure and keep the 'bubblin' crude' flowing. According to Howard Herzog, director of MIT's carbon sequestration initiative, "The technology to inject cabon dioxide into the ground is well established" and enhanced oil recovery is a mature technology with ~43 million tons of CO2 being injected every day at 67 comercial projects in the US... in 1998!

So, it seems to me that 'Clean Coal', or IGCC plants with sequestration are not so state of the art that they need 10 year demonstration projects like the FutureGen plant to demonstrate their feasability. Rather, they could be built now in large numbers to replace our aging greenhouse gas and criteria pollutant belching coal power plants and to meet increased baseload energy demand in the future (I personally like the prospects of IGCC rather than Nuclear Power to meet future baseload demand and/or produce hydrogen or electricity for alternative transport needs).

The major obstacle is that there is little incentive in the current US political and economic climate to build a more expensive IGCC plant rather than a traditional coal plant (probably everyones idea of the worst case option for power production these days). The full cost of pollutants and greenhouse gases is not factored into to cost of operating a coal plant so there is little incentive to built to technologically feasable but more expensive clean coal plants. We need to enact market forces that push investors and energy providers to build IGCC plants. (Alternatively, you could simply say that all new coal plants must meet certain emissions standards and let people come to the conclusion that they will need to construct IGCC plants if they want to build a new coal plant).

In short, clean coal plants should be being built by the dozens instead of waiting for decadal demonstration plants to be built. Clean coal isn't nuclear fusion, nor is it even rocket science. The news that a comercial plant is being built is great but we need more encouragement (in an economic sense) for these plants to be truly adopted.

Cheers....

[Jim From the Energy Blog]

The electrical utility industry is one of the most conservative, risk adverse industries which makes technology with the slightest amount of innovation a risk and thus not state of the art for that industry. This stance is justified by the very high reliability and production cost requirements. Gasification, other than from coal, adds little to the experience base because the composition of the syngas, in terms of contaminates, is not nearly the same. Experience comes primarily from Sassol and the DOE demonstration plants. None of these are quite as large as proposed AEP plants and only the DOE plants come close to demonstrating the combination of efficiency and pollution control that is required. In fact DOE has two more demo plants in the pipeline to demonstrate better technology and larger plant size which could be used as an excuse that the technology is not state of the art. But it must be admitted that DOE, through its demonstration program, has shown that IGCC has the potential to be the most economical way to meet environmental standards for criteria pollutants. Based on some analogous thought process AEP is apparantly willing to go ahead with spending $1 billion on two IGCC plants.

As far as sequestration, the experience with enhanced oil recovery is not applicable in the regions where this plant is proposed to be built. The amount of leakage (of CO2 from the underground storage) in EOR applications is not nearly as large a concern as it is when doing it for pollution control - in fact no standards for containment of the CO2 for sequestration exist. The amount of CO2 that has to be sequestered from a power plant is much larger than that used in most, if not all oil fields. The most likely means of sequestration, in this particular situation, is likely to be either in sealed, abandoned coal mines or as a means of forcing methane out of coal seams. Experience in these areas is very limited.

The commercial and political realities are that no company is going to voluntarily use sequestration unless it has been demonstrated in an extremely similar manner and that the permitting process must require that such technology be used according to established standards. The electric company has a responsibility to its stockholders to produce electricity at a price that is competitive and at the present time sequestration adds too much cost to be required without greater technological demonstration. That is not to say that sequestration, with a government subsidy, could not first be used in a commercial plant.

[JesseJenkins]

Jim, you write, "The commercial and political realities are that no company is going to voluntarily use sequestration unless it has been demonstrated in an extremely similar manner and that the permitting process must require that such technology be used according to established standards. The electric company has a responsibility to its stockholders to produce electricity at a price that is competitive and at the present time sequestration adds too much cost."

You've got it right there. Noone is going to use sequestration unless the permitting process requires that such a technology is used. It just costs too much more and so if they dont have to do it, electric companies wont.

You are probably right about the state of the technology for IGCC and sequestration but it still seems to be that the biggest problem isnt risky technology, its that there is NO incentive (political, regulatory or economic) to try to cut back on co2 emissions, at least in the US (not being a Kyoto signatory etc.). IGCC still may be used to combat criteria pollutants like Sulphur and Nitrous Oxides (as seems to be the case with AEP) but sequetration certainly wont be tried unless significant new market pressures develop to incent reducing co2 emissions.

[Tosh]

Large scale sequesration projects to be embarked upon in China.
Enviro-Energy Company Petromin Resources of Vancouver , Canada will be spearheading this initiative.
Petromin's first project will be a large scale (ECBM) enhanced coal bed methane project in the Province of Heilongjiang , China.
They have also recently announced that they will be partnering with the Alberta Research Council.
Regards

[discountcigarettesbox]

The $120 million facility will use bio-gas produced from one billion pounds of cattle manure to produce the steam used in the plant.