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Sustainable Development
Corporate Innovation Is Key to Success
In Slowing Climate Change

By Kurt Repanshek

Innovation requires nimbleness, resourcefulness and the determination to succeed. At times, it can mean going out on a limb to explore a technology that, while it looks good on paper, hasn’t yet proved itself in the field.

With the world’s scientific and political communities seeing ever more clearly the link between climate change and society’s growing greenhouse gas emissions, the search for solutions to cut those emissions has taken on a new urgency. The pressure is on for businesses to minimize their environmental impact, from both a social and an economic standpoint, as emissions directives and cap-and-trade legislation work their way through Congress. Balancing the need for energy with the need to mitigate climate change is the central challenge facing companies looking for sustainable development solutions.

No sector feels that imperative more keenly than the power generation industry, in particular companies that rely on the country’s most bountiful fossil fuel — coal — to create electricity.

Looking to the Past for a Cleaner Future
At American Electric Power (AEP), engineers are turning to an old practice to safely store carbon dioxide emissions from their flagship power plant in a bid to extend the usefulness of coal as a fuel. Oil and gas companies have long injected CO₂ underground to enhance the recovery of those fuels. Now AEP is drilling nearly two miles beneath the Ohio River Valley with the intent of permanently storing hundreds of thousands of tons of CO₂ in sandstone formations that will readily absorb the gas and sequester it beneath an impenetrable cap rock. Part of a growing panoply of techniques to mitigate climate change, the technological frontier AEP is exploring could significantly reduce CO₂ emissions and at the same time extend the usefulness of a fossil fuel found in abundance in the United States.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) describes the formations, which are some 7,000 to 9,500 feet deep, as “a promising, long-term option for safe [carbon dioxide] sequestration” that it expects will soak up and capture CO₂, much as similar formations contained oil and gas for millions of years before drilling brought these resources to the surface.

“Evaluating the feasibility of CO₂ storage will allow the energy industry to prove the viability of an evolving U.S. technology that will allow fossil-fuel-fired power plants to continue operating well into the future,” the DOE stated in “Storage of CO₂ in Geologic Formations in the Ohio River Valley Region,” a report released in 2008. “It will be especially beneficial to states that heavily depend on coal for electricity generation, such as West Virginia, Ohio and many of the large industrial Midwest states.”

“We think it’s important to go forward with demonstrating carbon capture and
storage technologies so that we can continue to use coal with less environmental impact.”

– Melissa McHenry, AEP

AEP’s carbon capture facility

To demonstrate the feasibility of this form of carbon sequestration, AEP will go on line this fall with a project that aims initially to store about 100,000 tons of CO₂ annually in these deep sandstone formations. The project will mark the first time a U.S. power plant has actually captured and stored this greenhouse gas on this scale. Using a chilled ammonia process to separate the CO₂ from the plant flue gas emissions, the gas is then compressed into a supercritical, or liquid, state and then injected into the sandstone formations. The project will take place at AEP’s Mountaineer power plant in New Haven, West Virginia. Since a key to the success of this technology is determining that the injected gas stays within the formations into which it is piped, AEP will rely on a series of wells to monitor the sequestered gas. Using data from the wells, its engineers can map any movements of the CO₂.

“AEP is the largest consumer of coal in the Western Hemisphere, so we have a vested interest in the success of CO₂ technology,” says company spokeswoman Melissa McHenry. “This demonstration builds on our history of technological leadership. Our 1,300-megawatt generating units are some of the largest, most efficient coal-fired units operating in the world today.”

Supporting Efficient Energy Production
The validation stage, which AEP expects to run for about two years, involves a 20-megawatt portion of the 1,300-megawatt Mountaineer plant’s flue gas. If all goes well, the company plans to scale up this process roughly tenfold. However, since the carbon sequestration system will likely require 15% to 20% of a power plant’s output to operate, only the most efficient power plants are candidates for the technology.

“We think it’s important to go forward with demonstrating carbon capture and storage technologies so that we can continue to use coal with less environmental impact,” says McHenry. “It’s an indigenous resource that is plentiful in the United States. Many state economies are dependent on coal. And, for the newest, biggest, most efficient coal-fired plants that operate today, it makes sense to develop a retrofit technology to address the CO₂ output of those facilities.”

It is innovative solutions like AEP’s that will enable the U.S. to support continued economic development with indigenous energy resources while addressing the challenge of global warming. And that is the key to sustainable development, which strives to preserve the future of both the environment and the economy.