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AEP seeks grant for burial of CO2
Saturday, August 22, 2009 5:16 AM
By Rita Price and Doug Caruso
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
American Electric Power wants $334 million in federal stimulus money to build the country's first commercial-scale system to capture carbon dioxide emitted from coal-fired power plants and bury it underground.
The system would be used in New Haven, W.Va., at AEP's Mountaineer plant, home to one of the biggest fossil-fueled power generators in the world.
The Columbus-based company says the government should help pay for the system because of the potential benefit to other electricity producers.
"This is a technology that is going to be valuable to a lot of companies," spokesman Pat Hemlepp said yesterday. "Is it fair for our customers to pay a huge penalty to bring along a technology that's going to help everyone in the nation?"
Critics say it's unfair to make taxpayers support such an expensive and, so far, unproven method for reducing the gas that causes global warming.
The process traps the carbon dioxide spewed by the coal plants, treats and compresses it, and then injects it more than a mile into the Earth for storage.
Nachy Kanfer, representative of the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign in Ohio, said the money would be better spent on renewable energy sources.
"We feel very strongly that coal can't be made clean," Kanfer said. "Are we really going to spend billions and billions on these old plants to make them just a little bit cleaner?"
Kanfer said the federal government needs to move away from coal and support jobs-producing solar and wind projects.
"We need a 'cash for coal-fired clunkers' program," he said.
AEP said the $334 million would pay about half the cost of the system. The power company's application to the U.S. Department of Energy says the system would begin commercial operation in 2015 and cover a portion of the plant.
It would capture about 16 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted by the plant, Hemlepp said.
Columbus-based Battelle, which has been working with AEP on the project at Mountaineer since 2002, also would likely benefit from the grant.
Battelle has conducted geologic tests and computer modeling and has drilled test wells there and elsewhere, said Neeraj Gupta, a geologist who is a senior research leader at Battelle.
The private, nonprofit research giant is preparing to test carbondioxide burying on a small scale in the wells near the Mountaineer plant during the next three years, he said.
"The wells have been drilled and are going through final checks," Gupta said. "We already have an injection permit from West Virginia for this."
Battelle has successfully buried 60,000 tons of carbon dioxide in wells drilled in Gaylord, Mich., he said.
The commercial-scale system AEP is proposing is the next step, he said.
"We are excited that the technology is continuing to move forward," Gupta said.
Meanwhile, Battelle an nounced this week that it is pulling out of a $92.8 million project to test carbon-dioxide burying at an ethanol plant in Darke County in western Ohio.
Katy Delaney, a Battelle spokeswoman, said only that "business consider ations" led to the decision. Political leaders in Greenville and in Darke County united against the test wells, said Mike Bowers, the mayor of Greenville. People there feared that tests could endanger the county's aquifer, which provides water to the farms that make up most of the county's economic base, he said. "That was very good news for us," Bowers said of Battelle's decision. "Messing with the natural resources of our area didn't seem to be a wise thing from an experimental standpoint."
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