TEXAS CAPTURE RETROFIT TO BREAK GROUND THIS MONTH

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
4/5/13

Austin-based Skyonic Corp. confirmed this week that it will break ground on its $125 million carbon capture retrofit of a Capitol Aggregates-owned cement plant near San Antonio in the coming weeks. The company is outfitting the plant with patented technology that upon completion in late 2014 will capture CO2, heavy metals and acid gases from 15 percent of the facility’s flue gas stream, mineralizing the chemicals and converting them into salable byproducts like sodium bicarbonate, or baking soda. The plant will also produce hydrochloric acid, currently in high demand as a natural gas fracking fluid, Skyonic CEO Joe Jones said in an interview this week. “The site is cleared at this point and we expect to actually cut dirt in the second half of April,” he said. “By beginning this commercial phase we’re going to make carbon capture a serious business.”

Jones said sequestering the CO2 in depleted oil wells or saline reservoirs will not be necessary given that essentially all of the carbon captured will be converted into salable products. For that reason, he said the technology is ideal for areas of the country where the geologic sequestration of CO2 is impractical or too expensive. “The carbonate market in the U.S. alone is $7 billion and there are lucrative portions of that market that can be fulfilled at very low cost,” he said. “Using synthetic carbonates to fulfill that market while eliminating that same amount of carbon from smokestacks, seems like an ideal solution. It does make sense to turn trash to treasure.” The capture technology being installed at the Capitol Aggregates plant, which was developed in part with $28 million in Department of Energy grants, will also limit about 95 percent of the facility’s mercury, SO2 and NOx emissions, Jones said.

Project Faced Delays

Skyonic pushed back retrofit work multiple times over the last several years as it aimed to net enough outside financial support to move forward. Construction was initially slated to begin in summer 2011, plans that were later delayed until last fall and again to early 2013. With the announcement of $35 million in backing from energy giants BP, ConocoPhillips, Northwater Capital and PVS Chemicals last year—as well as seed money from initial investors like venture capitalist Carl Berg and the construction and materials company Zachry Corp., which owns the Capitol Aggregates cement plant—the project has finally picked up enough backing to move forward.