Department Greenlights $167M for Retrofit Following Two-Year NEPA Process
Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
5/24/13
The Department of Energy greenlighted $167 million in stimulus cost-share funding for NRG Energy’s W.A. Parish carbon capture and storage retrofit in Texas this week. In a record of decision published in the May 23 edition of the Federal Register, DOE said it would be providing “limited financial assistance through a cooperative agreement” with NRG for the proposed $845 million post-combustion capture project under DOE’s stimulus-funded Clean Coal Power Initiative program. “A successful commercial-scale demonstration of amine-based carbon capture technology at NRG’s W.A. Parish Plant with beneficial use of the CO2 at an existing oil field would generate technical, environmental and financial data from the design, construction and operation of the CO2 capture facility, pipeline and CO2 monitoring facilities at the oil field,” the record of decision states. “The data would be used to help DOE evaluate whether the deployed technologies could be effectively and economically implemented at a commercial scale.”
The announcement wraps up a federal permitting process for the southeast Texas retrofit that has stretched on for nearly two years. A final environmental impact statement released by the Department in March concluded that the project would have no major environmental impacts on the surrounding area’s air quality, geology and groundwater during plant construction and operation. It said the project could also carry some beneficial environmental impacts, “primarily related to regional socioeconomics and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, but also related to some aspects of air quality, geology, groundwater and utilities,” according to the EIS. The record of decision presumably puts the W.A. Parish project on a path forward for financial close and plant construction later this summer, with commercial operations by 2015, as indicated by NRG officials in previous interviews. Company officials did not respond to requests for comment as of press time.
Design, Planning Have Seen Major Readjustments
W.A. Parish holds a particularly notable spot within DOE’s portfolio of large-scale demonstration projects, since it is the only remaining post-combustion project under development after American Electric Power killed its Mountaineer project in 2011. In the aftermath of that announcement, NRG officials decided to scale up W.A. Parish from what was initially planned to be a 60 MW-equivalent slipstream from the pre-existing W.A. Parish Generating Station southwest of Houston, to a 250 MWe unit that would capture—with a yet-to-be-announced advanced amine post-combustion capture system—1.6 million tonnes of CO2 for enhanced oil recovery operations at Hilcorp Energy’s West Ranch oilfield near the Gulf Coast.
NRG once again shifted its plans for the project last summer when it decided to bring the 80 MW natural gas turbine that will eventually power the capture unit’s compressors online early in order to temporarily generate peaking power for Texas’ grid, which has faced electricity shortages in recent high seasons due to increased demand. “By leveraging the planned construction of the carbon capture system and building the combustion turbine now, ahead of the economic price signals that would allow us to build new generation on its own, we can help the state of Texas meet its needs over the next two summers,” John Ragan, president of NRG’s Gulf Coast Operations, said at the time. NRG began construction on the turbine last fall and expects to have the unit online this summer, the company previously told GHG Monitor.
