AT THE MAJOR CCS PROJECTS: HECA, FUTUREGEN

Lindsay Kalter and Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
07/20/12

AT HECA: PROJECT’S WATER USE, EMISSIONS CONCERN LOCAL RESIDENTS

Residents of Kern County, Calif., raised concerns about water use and the effects of potential emissions related to the proposed Hydrogen Energy California (HECA) poly-generation carbon capture and storage project last week at a public hearing on the venture. About 155 people gathered for the July 12 meeting to assess local support for the project, which is receiving funding from the Department of Energy’s Clean Coal Power Initiative. Plans for the facility are being jointly assessed by the department and the California Energy Commission. The meeting, part of the federal National Environmental Policy Act process, will ultimately help contribute to the regulators’ decision on whether to grant developers an amended permit for the project. In the amended permit submitted earlier this summer, SCS Energy significantly modified original plans for the integrated gasification combined cycle project slated for a site 25 miles west of Bakersfield, Calif. after it took over the venture from BP and Rio Tinto last summer. The developer added a poly-generation component to the plant, which will allow it to sell electricity, urea fertilizer and captured CO2 for enhanced oil recovery use in nearby oil fields.

Those who attended the meeting—40 of which were local residents and farmers—discussed the potential impact that emissions from the plant’s gasification process might have on surrounding crops, Robert Worl, a project manager for the California Energy Commission’s siting division who is handling the HECA project, told GHG Monitor. Residents also voiced concerns about potential emissions caused by the transportation of the fuel source to HECA’s project site. According to Worl, the coal will be transported from out-of-state by train, and one proposed delivery route is a five-mile, privately owned rail spur that would deliver a bulk of the coal. The petroleum coke, he said, would be trucked into the area from Santa Maria—a method that he said would involve constant trips. In addition, if the rail spur were to become untenable, the coal would need to be transported roughly 27 miles by truck. There were concerns about emissions from the train engines and coal dust, Worl said. “There were also questions the transport emissions and the impact on roads in the area that people in the area use.” In addition, the residents expressed skepticism over whether this project would be a wise use of water, which Worl said is “always an issue in California, particularly in Central Valley.”

SCS CEO: Public Opinion Often Runs Counter to Projects

SCS Energy CEO James Croyle said public pushback is an expected and even welcome part of the routine to get controversial projects approved. The rigorous regulatory process is “tough and comprehensive and that’s where we do best,” he told GHG Monitor in an interview. But, “Public opinion is different, of course,” he said. “I’ve been in this business a long time, and I’ve never been in a situation that did not involve public opinion that ran counter to what people doing this kind of infrastructure-building were trying to do.”

Worl said the issues raised would be addressed in upcoming workshops in the area, which have yet to be planned, and in the preliminary staff assessment to be released around October.  But George Landman, director of finance and regulatory affairs for Hydrogen Energy California LLC, said the project has already proven its feasibility on the topics discussed at the meeting through permit attainment. He said project managers for the facility, which would sequester over 90 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions, submitted in May the supplemental information for the Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) permit and the Authority to Construct. “We are below the ambient air quality standards both nationally and in California,” he said, adding that the Bakersfield Mayor Harvey Hall attended the meeting as a project proponent. “A lot of the stuff we heard was what you typically hear for a development project, and we’ve addressed it for our air permits.”

He added that he thought the water concerns represented a “misunderstanding of our use of process water.” The facility plans to use brackish water in connection with the Buena Vista Water Storage District, which Landman said will allow fresh water to replace the contaminated water in the district’s aquifers.

AT FUTUREGEN: ALLIANCE AFFIRMS MORGAN COUNTY STORAGE SITE

The FutureGen Alliance this week affirmed that Morgan County in west-central Illinois is the “preferred” sequestration site for FutureGen 2.0 and that two alternate sites in the central and east-central portions of the state will no longer be maintained. The Alliance, the coalition of industry groups that is developing the project, said that recent engineering studies and geologic testing have “confirmed that the Morgan County site is an excellent location for CO2 storage.” “Affirming Morgan County as the preferred site for FutureGen 2.0 is a significant step forward for the project. This decision allows us to proceed with final permitting for the Morgan County site,” FutureGen Alliance CEO Ken Humphreys said in a statement.

The Alliance selected Morgan County as its preferred storage site in early 2011, and has since conducted a series of geologic tests in the area, along with two alternate sites in the nearby Christian and Douglas Counties. The Alliance said it found that the Morgan County site, which lies within the Mount Simon sandstone formation, is geologically stable and has satisfactory primary and secondary caprock formations to help permanently trap the CO2, as well as enough reservoir capacity to hold emissions generated from the 200 MW oxy-combustion unit. “Because the Alliance is confident that the site meets regulatory requirements, it is proceeding with an application for a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency permit for only the Morgan County site,” the group said in a release this week. The project will apply for a Class VI Underground Injection Control permit under EPA’s Safe Drinking Water program, project officials previously told GHG Monitor. The Alliance said that they have secured the rights to the underground pore space for CO2 injection and that desktop and field studies have shown that there are not any sensitive nearby environmental resources that could potentially be harmed by the project.

The Alliance and major project partners Babcock & Wilcox and Air Liquide submitted the final portion of its Phase II application to the Department of Energy last month. Developers plan on installing oxy-combustion capture technology on a 200 MW oil-fired unit at Ameren Energy Resources’ now-shuttered Meredosia plant on the Illinois River. DOE’s review of the project, which is expected to take several weeks to several months to complete, will determine whether the Alliance will be able to move forward on Phase II Front-End Engineering and Design (FEED) work for the project, which is set to receive $1 billion in federal stimulus dollars. Meanwhile, the lawyers for the Alliance and Ameren are continuing to finalize an option for the consortium to purchase the oil-fired unit at Meredosia from Ameren in order to move forward with the project.