The Engineer

Carbon capture funding

News

Princeton, New Jersey-based NRG Energy has been selected by the US Department of Energy (DOE) to receive up to $154m (£103m) to build a post-combustion carbon-capture demonstration unit at its WA Parish coal-fired power plant south west of Houston in Texas.

The project, which includes funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, was submitted under the Clean Coal Power Initiative Program (CCPI), a cost-shared collaboration between the US federal government and private industry to demonstrate low-emission carbon capture and storage technologies in coal-based power generation plants.

Scheduled to begin operating in 2013, NRG’s carbon-capture demonstration project at WA Parish will be among the first of its kind. It will use Fluor Corporation’s Econamine FG Plus technology to process flue gas from the plant, capturing 90 per cent of CO2, or approximately 400,000 metric tons of CO2 annually.

Once captured, the CO2 will be compressed and used in enhanced oilfield recovery operations.