President Obama's "All of the Above" energy policy has funded developments in wind, solar, conservation, alternative fuels, nuclear, and now, petroleum coke. Petroleum coke is a coal-like byproduct of oil refining that is commonly used to fuel domestic cement production, and feed overseas power plants. It usually burns a little dirtier, and emits greenhouse gasses similar to coal.
And now, almost six years after tying up billions of dollars in tax dollars, financial giant Leucadia has advanced a federally-financed scheme to convert petroleum coke into chemicals and acids. The Department of Energy has just published the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for Leucadia's Lake Charles, Louisiana, "Clean Energy Gasification Plant." http://energy.gov/...
Comments are due June 24.
Leucadia is big like Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway, with investments in casinos, timber, insurance, and now, the energy industry. Nonetheless, despite its riches, in 2007 Leucadia sought billions of dollars in corporate welfare in the form of Department of Energy loan guarantees and funding intended for hurricane reconstruction. Leucadia's schemes included building new coal burning power plants in Indiana and Illinois, and petroleum coke-to-synthetic gas and power and chemical plants in Mississippi and Louisiana.
Local opposition soon scuttled Leucadia's coal plant schemes. And Leucadia's plan to convert petroleum coke into synthetic natural gas was based on the assumption that natural gas prices would skyrocket. But from the minute Leucadia filed their plans, gas prices plummeted. Before the plants had even broken ground, area utilities were refusing to buy Leucadia's ridiculously overpriced gas.
So over $2 billion in Gulf Opportunity (GO Zone) hurricane reconstruction bonds, already pledged to Leucadia, along with $261 million in DOE loan guarantees, languished, unspent, for the last 5 years, while Leucadia regrouped.
Now Leucadia claims they've converted the plans for their unbuilt Lake Charles site, to gasify petroleum coke and convert it to methanol, an industrial chemical, and sulfuric acid. Leucadia has indicated in the past that it will buy some of its petroleum coke feedstock from the Kochs, and will sell the acid to the Kochs, too.
Leucadia claims it is entitled to $261 million in federal loan guarantees because it will capture a fraction of its Greenhouse Gasses (mainly carbon dioxide) from "gasifying" petroleum coke, and will pipe the CO2 200 miles to the formerly mammoth Hastings oil field, south of Houston. There, the CO2 will be injected underground, to force residual crude oil to the surface for recovery.
The devil in these details is how much, if any CO2 will actually be captured? Of course, the DOE brags at public meetings that the system is capable of capturing 100% of the 5.8 million tons/year of total CO2 emissions, comparable to the Greenhouse gasses from a large coal fired power plant.
But the fine print in the meeting's DOE handouts mentioned potential capture of only 50% of the CO2. The State air permit doesn't require capture of any CO2, and the plant has equipment that will allow venting of all the CO2.
And now the DEIS says the DOE intends to "...demonstrate the capture, transport, and permanent storage..." of only one million tons of CO2, or about 16% of the total GHG emissions.
I've been going to this project's public hearings for six years now, and the company and government have never described the project the same way twice. They've modified the loan guarantees and air permits in secret, and documents released under the Freedom of Information Act are mostly obliterated with black magic marker.
I'd honestly like to see meaningful carbon capture from fossil fuel combustion, but if we are pouring tax dollars into supporting a facility, I'd sure like to see more than 16% recovery. I'm hoping to get up on my hind legs at the June 4 meeting in Lake Charles or the June 5 meeting in Pearland, Texas, and give them heck, one more time.