|
28 December 2007 - US utility Energy Northwest is abandoning plans to consider injecting some carbon dioxide emissions underground at its proposed Pacific Mountain Energy Centre near Kalama.
The 793 MW project initially was touted as a candidate for the country's first large-scale power station that would burn a gas derived from a slurry of coal or petroleum coke and permanently store some carbon dioxide emissions underground.
But the public power consortium, pursuing its most ambitious project since its failed nuclear construction campaign in the 1970s and early 1980s, said it could not promise to capture carbon and store it in rock formations.
And after a brief tussle with the state's Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council over the reading of the state's new emissions-capping greenhouse gas law, Energy Northwest has decided to scrap the idea.
Instead, it'll amend its site certificate application and reconfigure the $1.5bn project with a different operations plan to get it under the emissions cap. That could be done by adding cleaner fuels to the fuel mix, such as natural gas, that would likely cost more.
Energy Northwest does not save much by ditching what is known as carbon sequestration. It had only committed $60m in project funds to promote it. But retrofitting the project to make it ready to deliver carbon underground - something that hasn't yet been studied at the site - would have cost far more.
| 
Articles 
| View all PennWell sites | View all PennWell events
Add RSS Feed
