by David Middleton
THE 240MWE FACILITY IS THE LARGEST POST-COMBUSTION CARBON CAPTURE PROJECT IN THE WORLD
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Secretary of Energy Rick Perry took part in a ribbon-cutting ceremony today to mark the opening of Petra Nova, the world’s largest post-combustion carbon capture project, which was completed on-schedule and on-budget. The large-scale demonstration project, located at the W.A. Parish power plant in Thompsons, Texas, is a joint venture between NRG Energy (NRG) and JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration Corporation (JX).
“I commend all those who contributed to this major achievement,” said Secretary Perry.
“While the Petra Nova project will certainly benefit Texas, it also demonstrates that clean coal technologies can have a meaningful and positive impact on the Nation’s energy security and economic growth.”
Funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and originally conceived as a 60-megawatt electric (MWe) capture project,
the project sponsors expanded the design to capture emissions from 240 MWe of generation at the Houston-area power plant, quadrupling the size of the capture project without additional federal investment.
During performance testing, the system demonstrated a carbon capture rate of more than 90 percent.
At its current level of operation,
Petra Nova will capture more than 5,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per day,
which will be used for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) at the West Ranch Oil Field.
The project is expected to boost production at West Ranch from 500 barrels per day to approximately 15,000 barrels per day. It is estimated that the field holds 60 million barrels of oil recoverable from EOR operations.
The successful commencement of Petra Nova operations also represents an important step in advancing the commercialization of technologies that capture CO2 from the flue gas of existing power plants. Its success could become the model for future coal-fired power generation facilities.
The addition of CO2 capture capability to the existing fleet of power plants could support CO2 pipeline infrastructure development and drive domestic EOR opportunities.
U.S. Department of Energy
The Petra Nova carbon capture system was installed in the W.A. Parish generation station. This is the largest and cleanest fossil fuel generaton station in the United States:
W.A. Parish Electric Generation Station, Thompson, Texas
Owner/operator: Texas Genco Holdings Inc.
Texas Genco has invested heavily in upgrading its W.A. Parish coal- and gas-fired plant southwest of Houston. Although this nine-unit, 3,653-MW plant is the largest fossil-fueled plant in America, its NOx emissions have been reduced to microscopic levels. Based on those levels, W.A. Parish could rightly claim that it is among the cleanest coal plants in the U.S.
By Brett Butler, Technical Supervisor, W.A. Parish Plant
Texas Genco’s W.A. Parish Electric Generation Station (WAP) is the largest coal- and gas-fired power facility in the U.S. based on total net generating capacity. It and its owner, Texas Genco Holdings Inc., operate in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), one of the largest electric power markets in the nation. Over the past few years, the majority-owned subsidiary of Houston-based CenterPoint Energy Inc. has met the challenge of adding emissions control equipment to these baseload units while maintaining the availability and reliability required by ERCOT’s competitive market.
In the process, Texas Genco has emerged as an industry leader at reducing emissions and demonstrating new NOx-control technologies. The company’s fleet of plants operates at one of the lowest NOx emission rates in the country, and WAP likely emits less NOx on a lb/MMBtu basis than any coal-fired plant of any size in the U.S. Cleanliness is costly; the company has spent more than $700 million on new emission controls since 1999.
With the commissioning of another round of emissions-control equipment this year, NOx emissions from Texas Genco’s Houston-area power plants—including WAP—will be 88% lower than 1998 levels. These actions play a major role in the Houston/Galveston Area Ozone State Implementation Plan and are helping to clean the air in the greater Houston area. To honor the accomplishment, the W.A. Parish plant was recently given the Facility Award by the Power Industry Division of the Instrumentation, Systems, and Automation Society (Research Triangle Park, N.C.)
for installing equipment
to reduce emissions and
improve reliability while
minimizing operational costs.
to reduce emissions and
improve reliability while
minimizing operational costs.
[…]
Platts
The W.A. Parrish Generation Station has a generating capacity of about 3,660 MW (2,740 MW of coal and 1,190 MW of natural gas capacity). Its total capacity is approximately the same as the ten largest solar PV plants in the U.S. combined (3,713 MW). From 2002-2009, W.A. Parrish operated at 85% of capacity. The war on coal gradually reduced its operations to 57% of capacity in 2016.
The Petra Nova carbon capture system will enable the plant to capture about 90% of the CO2 from 240 MW of its coal capacity. It is expected to capture about 1.6 million tons of CO2 per year. The cost of the carbon capture system was approximately $1 billion, with the taxpayers picking up 19% of the tab.
Normally, I would call this a pointless waste of money. It won’t have any effect on atmospheric CO2 or the weather. However, this carbon capture system actually serves a useful purpose:
On September 15, 2008, Anthony DePalma of the New York Times wrote an article about the Mohonk Lakes USHCN weather station titled Weather History Offers Insight Into Global Warming. This article claimed, in part, that the average annual temperature has risen 2.7 degrees in 112 years at this station. What struck me about the article was the rather quaint description of the manner in which temperatures are recorded, which I have excerpted here (emphasis mine):
Mr. Huth opened the weather station, a louvered box about the size of a suitcase, and leaned in. He checked the high and low temperatures of the day on a pair of official Weather Service thermometers and then manually reset them…
If the procedure seems old-fashioned, that is just as it is intended. The temperatures that Mr. Huth recorded that day were the 41,152nd daily readings at this station, each taken exactly the same way. “Sometimes it feels like I’ve done most of them myself,” said Mr. Huth, who is one of only five people to have served as official weather observer at this station since the first reading was taken on Jan. 1, 1896.
That extremely limited number of observers greatly enhances the reliability, and therefore the value, of the data. Other weather stations have operated longer, but few match Mohonk’s consistency and reliability. “The quality of their observations is second to none on a number of counts,” said Raymond G. O’Keefe, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Albany. “They’re very precise, they keep great records and they’ve done it for a very long time.”
Mohonk’s data stands apart from that of most other cooperative weather observers in other respects as well. The station has never been moved, and the resort, along with the area immediately surrounding the box, has hardly changed over time.
Clearly the data collected at this site is of the highest quality. Five observers committed to their work. No station moves. No equipment changes according to Mr. Huth (in contrast to the NOAA MMS records). Attention to detail unparalleled elsewhere. A truly Norman Rockwell image of dedication.
After reading the article, I wondered what happened to Mr. Huth’s data, and the data collected by the four observers who preceded him. What I learned is that NOAA doesn’t quite trust the data meticulously collected by Mr. Huth and his predecessors. Neither does GISS trust the data NOAA hands it. Following is a description of what is done with the data.
Let’s begin with the process of getting the data to NOAA:
[caption id="attachment_3221" align="aligncenter" width="510" caption="From Co-op to NOAA"][/caption]
Mr. Huth and other observers like him record their data in a “B91 Form”, which is submitted to NOAA every month. These forms can be downloaded for free from the NOAA website. Current B91 forms show the day’s minimum and maximum temperature as well as the time of observation. Older records often include multiple readings of temperature throughout the day. The month’s record of daily temperatures is added to each station’s historical record of daily temperatures, which can be downloaded from NOAA’s FTP site here.
The B91 form for Mohonk Lake is hand-written, and temperatures are recorded in Farenheit. Transcribing the data to the electronic daily record introduces an opportunity for error, but I spot-checked a number of B91 forms – converting degrees F to tenths of degree C – and found no errors. Kudos to the NOAA transcriptionists.
Next comes the first phase of NOAA adjustments.
[caption id="attachment_3222" align="aligncenter" width="510" caption="NOAA to USHCN (part I) and GHCN"][/caption]
The pristine data from Mohonk Lake are subject to a number of quality control and homogeneity testing and adjustment procedures. First, data is checked against a number of quality control tests, primarily to eliminate gross transcription errors. Next, monthly averages are calculated from the TMIN and TMAX values. This is straightforward when both values exist for all days in a month, but in the case of Mohonk Lake there are a number of months early in the record with several missing TMIN and/or TMAX values. Nevertheless, NOAA seems capable of creating an average temperature for many of those months. The result is referred to as the “Areal data”.
The Areal data are stored in a file called hcn_doe_mean_data, which can be found here. Even though the daily data files are updated frequently, hcn_doe_mean_data has not been updated in nearly a year. The Areal data also seem to be stored in the GHCN v2.mean file, which can be found here on NOAA’s FTP site. This is the case for Mohonk Lake.
Of course, more NOAA adjustments are needed.
[caption id="attachment_3223" align="aligncenter" width="510" caption="USCHN (part II and III)"][/caption]
The Areal data is adjusted for time of observation and stored as a seperate entry in hcn_doe_mean_data. TOB adjustment is briefly described here. Following the TOB adjustment, the series is tested for homogeneity. This procedure evaluates non-climatic discontinuities (artificial changepoints) in a station’s temperature caused by random changes to a station such as equipment relocations and changes. The version 2 algorithm looks at up to 40 highly-correlated series from nearby stations. The result of this homogenization is then passed on to FILNET which creates estimates for missing data. The output of FILNET is stored as a seperate entry in hcn_doe_mean_data.
Now GISS wants to use the data, but the NOAA adjustments are not quite what they are looking for. So what do they do? They estimate the NOAA adjustments and back them out!
[caption id="attachment_3224" align="aligncenter" width="510" caption="USHCN and GHCN to GISS"][/caption]
GISS now takes both v2.mean and hcn_doe_mean_data, and lops off any record before 1880. GISS will also look at only the FILNET data from hcn_doe_mean_data. Temperatures in F are converted and scaled to 0.1C.
This is where things get bizarre.
For each of the twelve months in a calendar year, GISS looks at the ten most recent years in common between the two data sets. For each month in those ten most recent years it takes the difference between the FILNET temperature and the v2.mean temperature, and averages them. Then, GISS goes through the entire FILNET record and subtracts the monthly offset from each monthly temperature.
It appears to me that what GISS is attempting to do is remove the corrections done by NOAA from the USHCN data. Standing back to look at the forest through the trees, GISS appears to be trying to recreate the Areal data, failing to recognize that v2.mean is the Areal data, and that hcn_doe_mean_data also contains the Areal data.
Here is a plot of the difference between the monthly raw data from Mohonk Lake and the data GISS creates in GISTEMP STEP0 (yes, I am well aware that in this case it appears the GISS process slightly cools the record). Units on the left are 0.1C.
Even supposedly pristine data cannot escape the adjustment process.
" data-medium-file="" data-large-file="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-3253" src="https://debunkhouse.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/petranova.png" alt="PetraNova.PNG" scale="0" style="-x-ignore: 1">
NRG Petra Nova Fact Sheet
The Captured CO2 will employ Enhanced Oil Recovery to enhance production at the West Ranch oil field, which is operated by Hilcorp Energy Company. It is expected that oil production will be boosted from around 300 barrels per day today to up to 15,000 barrels per day while also sequestering CO2underground. This field is currently estimated to hold approximately 60 million barrels of oil recoverable from EOR operations
How Carbon Capture Works
Download high resolution images
NRG
The West Ranch oil field has produced about 390 million barrels of oil since 1938. CO2 injection will boost the production from 300 to as much as 15,000 barrels of oil per day.
The EOR could lead to the recovery of 60 million barrels of oil that would otherwise be “left in the ground.” Irony is such a beautiful thing!
And the really cool thing about this project: It makes money!
FiscalNotes
NRG’s Petra Nova Plant Captures Carbon, Boosts Bottom Line
An interview with David Greeson, Vice President of Development, NRG Energy Inc.
by Brian Wellborn
NRG Energy Inc. (NRG) and JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration jointly operate the Petra Nova Carbon Capture project, the world’s largest retrofit post-combustion carbon capture system, at the W.A. Parish Generating Station southwest of Houston.
Fiscal Notes recently spoke with NRG Vice President of Development David Greeson to discuss the Petra Nova project and learn what makes its capture system unique, environmentally sound and profitable.
Fiscal Notes: What are Petra Nova’s broad environmental goals?
David Greeson: The goal of the Petra Nova project is to capture more than 90 percent of the carbon dioxide (CO2) in the exhaust flue gas from an existing coal-fired unit at the W.A. Parish power plant. We want to prove it’s feasible to build a carbon capture system on schedule and on budget. Demonstrating the system working at full commercial scale will provide a path forward to address CO2 emissions from existing coal-fired plants, both in the U.S. and around the world.
In addition, we’re looking to create a commercial structure that couples power generation with oil recovery for potential long-term viability — not only to pay for the carbon capture and storage system but also to provide an economic return for investors.
[…]
Fiscal Notes: How economically viable is Petra Nova’s carbon capture process?
Greeson: As long as oil is priced at around $50 per barrel or above, sales of the oil from the West Ranch field will pay for the Petra Nova project.
[…]
Comptroller.Texas.Gov
The price of CO2 for EOR projects is generally pegged to the price of oil.
At >$50/bbl, the sale of the CO2 to Hilcorp will pay for the carbon capture system.
Projects like this do not need subsidies.
This will enable the coal-fired plants to operate at a higher capacity and prevent 60 million barrels of oil from becoming “stranded assets.” I just love irony!
Featured Image Source
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/04/18/clean-coal-carbon-capture-and-enhanced-oil-recovery/
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