Coal-fired power plants, which generate roughly 50 percent of the nation’s electricity, produce more than 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year—approximately 34 percent of all U.S. man-made carbon dioxide output (the largest single source)—and about 40 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions from human activity.

Aerial view of the Great Plains Synfuels Plant near Beulah, ND

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As electric utilities with coal-burning power stations scramble for ways to meet electricity demand while curbing emissions of greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide, blamed for contributing to global climate change, one solution has come to the forefront: separating carbon dioxide that normally goes up a smokestack, compressing it, pumping it down into spent oil and natural gas wells, saline reservoirs, or inaccessible coal seams, and keeping it there forever—a process called carbon capture and storage (CCS).

“Much study still needs to be done on CCS,” concedes George Offen, senior technical executive for the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), a non-profit utility-sponsored consortium based in Palo Alto, Calif. He confirms that only three plants currently remove carbon dioxide from gas production and store it underground.

One of those plants is the Great Plains Synfuels Plant, a subsidiary of Basin Electric Power Cooperative, near Beulah, N.D.

Since 2000, the synfuels plant has shipped 8,700 tons of compressed carbon dioxide daily via a 205-mile-long pipeline buried four feet underground to oil fields in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. There, two oil companies inject the colorless, odorless gas several thousand feet down into depleted wells to bring more crude to the surface. In turn, the carbon dioxide gets entombed permanently.

Earlier this year EPRI spelled out how electric utilities could play a role in helping the United States’ energy industry slash carbon dioxide emissions below 1990 levels within 23 years—even as they add about 40 percent more load, half of which will be generated by coal—by taking aggressive steps in seven principal areas. The biggest cuts, EPRI noted, would come from adding CCS technologies to new coal-fired power plants coming on-line after 2020.

Carbon capture and storage not ready for prime time

Although technology to take carbon dioxide from flue gas in coal-burning power plants exists, “it’s just not ready for prime time,” asserts Ed Torrero, executive director of the Cooperative Research Network (CRN).

A recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology study, The Future of Coal: Options for a Carbon-Constrained World, echoes Torrero’s point.

Independent of whatever government policies are adopted to control carbon dioxide emissions, the MIT researchers advocate as a “priority objective” five large-scale projects that demonstrate the technical, economic, and environmental performance of technologies for capturing, transporting, and storing carbon dioxide.

Cooperatives are poised to assist in this research.

• Basin Electric Power recently began seeking proposals from developers to launch a CCS demonstration project at its 900-MW coal-fired Antelope Valley Station, which sits next door to the Great Plains Synfuels Plant. The G&T expects to make a decision on partners shortly.
• Arizona Electric Power Cooperative (AEPCO), a G&T based in Benson, Ariz., that supplies wholesale power to six distribution co-ops in the Southwest, will participate with three other Grand Canyon State utilities in the $4 million Arizona Utilities Carbon Dioxide Storage Pilot Project sponsored by the West Coast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership—one of seven U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) large-scale carbon storage initiatives. The program will test carbon dioxide storage in geologic formations in 2008 and 2009, with DOE picking up 80 percent of the costs.
• The Cooperative Research Network, for its part, may join a DOE sequestration endeavor near Gaylord, Mich., where 10,000 tons of carbon dioxide derived from a natural gas processing plant will be injected into deep saline formations. The carbon dioxide would be captured by an amine scrubber; a derivative of amine scrubbing technology holds promise for post-combustion carbon capture at power plants. The Michigan site features most elements of a complete sequestration system—a compression plant, an 8-mile-long supercritical pipeline, and injection and monitoring wells.

Consumer costs of carbon capture and storage

In a July 6 editorial, “Global Warming and Your Wallet,” the New York Times highlighted that “leading politicians have yet to educate their constituents [and fellow colleagues] about an unpleasant and inescapable truth: any serious effort to fight warming will require everyone to pay more for energy.”

“The big worry for utilities is that if advancements in this field are slow to take root, the price of electricity from a generating station employing CCS as we know it today could easily double,” says CRN’s Terrero.

EPRI’s Offen concurs. “Just building new coal-fired generators with CCS technology will boost capital costs by around 40 percent, while the tab for retrofitting plants, if possible, could run 60 percent to 80 percent of what it would take to replace a facility. In addition, CCS drains an estimated 20 percent to 30 percent of the energy from a coal plant.”

Glenn English, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, sees the debate on climate change growing hotter. “Electric co-op consumers want something done, but they also are conscious that there is a price to pay for reducing greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide,” he concludes. “But as co-ops, we have a responsibility to protect our consumer-members and an obligation to serve. We need to encourage our elected officials to ‘get climate change right,’ and to work for creating sustainable, long-term solutions based on new technology. If we can get the issue of what it will cost the consumer into public policy discussions, then we will succeed.”

This article represents the fifth in a series on how electric co-ops are looking out for their consumers and working to control power costs in an environmentally responsible fashion. Aimed at “closing the reality gap” on public understanding about climate change, the series examines ways electric co-ops are addressing seven Electric Power Research Institute recommendations that will allow the electric utility industry to slow, halt, and eventually decrease carbon dioxide emissions to 1990 levels by 2030 while still meeting demand for affordable, reliable electricity. The seven recommendations (some of which are still on the drawing table) are: boosting energy efficiency, improving the operating efficiency of coal-fired power plants, investing in renewable energy, expanding nuclear power capacity, capturing and storing carbon produced by coal-fired power plants, adding distributed generation resources, and marketing plug-in hybrid vehicles.