Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
12/19/2014
If the wide-scale deployment of carbon capture and storage technology on coal occurs within 10 years, deployment of the technology onto natural gas facilities could follow as little as five years behind, according to Revis James, Director for Generation Research and Development at the Electric Power Research Institute. Speaking at an event hosted by the United States Energy Association this week, James suggested that the use of CCS on coal is similar enough to gas that there would be little impediment to expanding deployment once the technology has proven viable on coal. “There are technical differences,” James said. “I just don’t think that they are so major that they would suggest an additional 10-to-15 year delay.”
However, to facilitate the transition, several key issues with CCS technology at present must be resolved, James said. “I don’t mean just, ‘We have the science,’ but it’s improved in terms of its cost effectiveness and the energy penalty has been reduced adequately and that you are confident of the ability to engineer the systems, to staff the capture facility,” James said. “You have procedures [and] maintenance practices in place. To get to the point where all those things can be deployed, we think that’s a decade away. That puts us out in 2025 so for us, we think it shouldn’t be far after that that you would have CCS [on gas]. I don’t see enough differences between combined cycle and coal to suggests a much longer delay. … I’d say within a five year time after that would be my feeling,” he said. “That’s a reasonable supposition.”
Challenges Exist in Deploying CCS on Gas
James noted several challenges related to the deployment of CCS on natural gas plants, many tied to the characteristics of the current gas fleet. “I don’t think these things, when they were designed … they were not designed with the idea that they would be operated for long periods of time, like the same lengths of periods of time as coal units,” he said noting that maintenance issues have already begun to surface at some units. Given the short lifespan of the current fleet it is questionable if planners would be willing to spend potentially large sums of money on retrofitting the plants with CCS.
The future fleet may be better suited to CCS technology as the cost of installing CCS on a new build site is significantly less than a retrofit, however this also depends on the ability of industry to work out some kinks in the CCS process and make the process more efficient, James said. “It’s more expensive to have to go back and retrofit something that wasn’t designed for CO2 capture than it is to build something from scratch that does have CO2 planned in,” he said. “Big issues are; if the units can run at a higher efficiency factor, you’re probably going to get a little bit of a better deal on your capture. With the gas units, fuel costs are such a large fraction of the electricity production costs for gas units that cost uncertainty is a more important [factor] than the avoided cost of capturing the CO2, even though CO2 is expensive.”
Demonstrations Needed
James also noted the need for demonstration projects for CCS on natural gas plants. “With the coal area there’s been demonstrations, physical demonstrations, where we’ve taken capture technologies put them on a power plant, diverted a small fraction of the power plant’s output so we could capture CO2 from the flue gas and we’ve done tests,” he said. “That’s not the case here with the combined cycles; most of this is all paper studies.”
