PAGES

Friday, September 30, 2011

Energy Department in for more than 1/4 of cost of building clean-coal power plant in Texas

The Energy Department "will provide a Texas clean-coal plant with $450 million in funding months after a power company shelved plans for a similar plant in West Virginia," Timothy Gardner of Reuters reports. Texas Clean Energy LLC will get $450 million "through a cooperative agreement, up from its original plan to provide $350 million." The plant is expected to cost more than $1.7 billion.

The plant is supposed to capture about 90 percent of its greenhouse-gas emissions and send carbon dioxide "through a regional pipeline network to existing oil fields in the Permian Basin of West Texas for use in enhanced oil recovery," the department said in the Federal Register. Gardner notes that the money comes from a program "that was created during the administration of George W. Bush" and received more funding from President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package.

"Carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS, has been touted as one possible way to reduce the country's greenhouse gas emissions. But it has suffered a series of setbacks, including high costs, and the failure by the U.S. Senate to pass an energy bill that would have put a cost on emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases," Gardner writes, noting that American Electric Power recently "shelved plans to capture heat-trapping emissions from a coal plant in West Virginia, citing that failure to put a cost on emissions." (Read more)

No comments:

Post a Comment