The U.S. Department of Energy made what seemed like a good announcement today. It's the Petra Nova project:
A coal-fired power plant in Texas is on its way to capturing 1.4 million tons of CO2 that previously would have been released into the air.
Rather than building an entirely new facility, the Petra Nova project will apply carbon capture technology to an existing coal-fired power plant -- helping to advance the technologies that enable cleaner, safer and more sustainable energy production from our abundant fossil energy resources.
When I first read this I was pretty excited and it only got better. The DOE originally gave the company $167 million for the project, but
Project sponsors NRG Energy Inc. and JX Nippon (a Japanese oil refiner) decided they could do better than that. They quadrupled the size of the project -- expanding the design to capture the emissions from 240 megawatts of generation -- with no additional federal funding.
This is the equivalent of taking 250,000 cars off the road, as far as CO2 emissions are concerned. Not only is this going down in Texas, the companies involved quadrupled the size of the project out of their own pockets. Maybe libertarianism isn't all just smoke and mirrors...and then reality came knocking.
The captured carbon dioxide will then be compressed, dried and transported to an oil field where it will be used to recover previously unreachable oil -- a process known as Enhanced Oil Recovery or EOR -- and will end up stored permanently underground.
Suddenly it was making more sense to me. While all EOR is not fracking, one thing is clear, we don't understand even short term consequences of using these types of techniques. Also, why are we continuing to support what is a dead end (pun intended)? There are other renewable resources we should be focusing on and investing in.
Here's something else that could be done with all that CO2 and as Richard Masel, a researcher from Dioxide Materials, said:
My view is that burying the CO2 and leaving it for future generations is not a solution to the problem. Instead we need to find ways to recycle CO2 into something useful...