Carbon-capture plant commissioned

A demonstration carbon-capture and storage plant (CCS) plant of 20MW capacity has been formally commissioned at New Haven, West Virginia,

The plant will separate out more than 100,000 tons of CO₂ per year, which will be transported via pipeline to salt-water-bearing sandstone strata, for storage on site.

American Electric Power (AEP), the US electricity generating company, Alstom and RWE are implementing the CCS system at AEP's 1,300MW Mountaineer hard-coal-fired power plant.

For its part, Alstom has developed the chilled ammonia process, which separates CO₂ from flue gas after combustion. In a smaller pilot plant in Wisconsin, operated by Alstom and the Electric Power Research Institute, the chilled ammonia separation technology has proven itself over the past 18 months.

Now the plan is to demonstrate the process’ commercial-scale viability at Mountaineer. If this proves successful, AEP also plans to deploy the chilled ammonia process in a much larger follow-on project. Around 1.5m tons of CO₂ should then be separated out each year.