Carbon capture

BP and Rio Tinto are working on plans for the potential development of a $1.5 billion coal-fired power generation project at Kwinana in Western Australia that would be fully integrated with a carbon capture and storage facility to reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases.

This will be the first new project for Hydrogen Energy, the new company launched by BP and Rio Tinto last week.

The planned project would be an industrial-scale coal-fired power and carbon capture and storage project. It would generate enough electricity to meet 15 per cent of the demand of south west Western Australia, while each year capturing and permanently storing about four million tonnes of carbon dioxide which otherwise would have been emitted to the atmosphere.

The project would gasify locally-produced coal from the Collie region to produce hydrogen and carbon dioxide. The hydrogen would be used to fuel the power station and around 90 per cent of the carbon dioxide would be captured and stored permanently in a deep underground geological formation.