Industry Week reports a prototype carbon sequestration plant at the American Electric Mountaineer facility in New Haven, W. Virginia (full Article here). Let’s look further, and let’s look at the numbers. The article states: “the pilot facility captures and stores around 20 megawatts of carbon dioxide from West Virginia’s Mountaineer plant. The unit can handle only a fraction of Mountaineer’s 1,300 megawatt capacity”
I suppose it is reasonable to assume that they mean they have essentially created a 20 mw power plant inside the main 1,300 mw plant, and they can sequester the carbon for this 20 mw subplant. That’s great. A 20 mw sub-plant in a 1,300 mw plant is 1.5385% of the total. That’s like taking a Hummer that get’s 10 miles to the gallon, and tuning the engine and keeping the tires properly inflated so it gets another 812 feet 3.94 inches, for a total of 10.15385 miles to the gallon. You can do that. But you can’t do it and claim to be driving an efficient vehicle or conserving energy in a meaningful way.
My first question is “What’s a megawatt of carbon dioxide?” Carbon dioxide is measured in cubic feet, ounces, or metric tons. Megawatts don’t apply to quantities of solids, liquids, or gases; watts, kilowatts, and megawatts measure capacity to produce power. Watt-hours, kilowatt-hours, and megawatt-hours are measures of power. If they don’t know what they’re talking about that doesn’t give me much confidence that they know what they’re doing.
The article goes on to say “Alstom aims to have a full-scale commercial carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility operational by 2015.” It says says “We have a prototype.” That means that by the end 2015 – six years from now – they hope to be successful. Six years is a long time to keep a project on schedule. Phrased another way, six years is a long time for nothing to go wrong.
The article also states “burying the captured carbon dioxide 7200 feet underground.” That’s roughly 1.36364 miles underground. I have some questions:
- How much will it cost to run, in terms of 1) money and 2) energy to put the carbon dioxide down there, and keep it down there?
- How much does it cost to build?
- How long can we pump carbon dioxide down there? If the coal plant has a 30 year life expectancy, then don’t we will need to pump carbon dioxide 1.36364 miles down for 30 years?
- What happens if something goes wrong at 7200 feet? Or 5280 feet underground? Or even 528 feet underground? If something goes wrong close to the surface I expect we’ll see a geyser of ice cold carbon dioxide.
T. Boone Pickens says land based wind costs about $2.0 Billion per gigawatt of capacity. Pickens has been called many things, but he’s never been called an environmentalist.
Solar is about $6.5 Billion per gigawatt, when you’re talking 100 to 500 kw systems in New Jersey.
According to Kevin Riddell, in the New York Times, (click here for article) this 20 MW carbon sequestration subsystem will cost “well over $100 million.”
American Electric Power is spending $73 million on the capture and storage effort, which includes half the cost of the factory. Alstom, the manufacturer of the new equipment, paid for the other half of the factory, hoping to develop expertise that will win it a worldwide market. Alstom would not say what it spent, but public figures indicate that the two companies are jointly spending well over $100 million.
If “half the cost” of the facility is $73 million, then the other half is also $73 million. That “well over $100 million” adds up to about $146 million. For a 20 mw facility, that’s $7.3 million per mw. Utility scale Solar is $6.5 billion per mw. Solar costs less than coal, and that’s before you factor in the costs of fuel, mining, and cleaning up the mess.