Tenaska to Build Clean Power Plant

By Steve Jordon, Omaha World-Herald, Neb.

Feb. 20–An Omaha company announced plans Tuesday to build the nation’s first commercial-sized coal-fired power plant that will capture its carbon dioxide and store it underground instead of sending it into the air.

Tenaska Inc., which builds and operates power plants around the country, said the carbon dioxide would be sold to oil companies, which would pipe it underground to drive out petroleum deposits.

Carbon dioxide from coal furnaces at power plants has been blamed for warming the Earth’s atmosphere. Experts have said capturing and storing the gas permanently underground would reduce its buildup in the atmosphere, but nobody has tried the technology on a commercial scale.

Developers have been deterred by the cost of equipment to capture the carbon dioxide and pipelines to send the gas underground. But coal is a cheap, abundant domestic fuel source that generates about half the nation’s electricity.

Environmental groups have challenged construction of other coal-fired power plants because of their emissions.

Known as the Tenaska Trailblazer Energy Center, the new Texas power plant would be a breakthrough in producing clean-source electricity, Tenaska said, and appears to be economically feasible because the emissions can be used to generate revenue.

The U.S. Department of Energy has a carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) program to encourage such uses, and the National Coal Council, an advisory group to the U.S. energy secretary, favors efforts to use the technology.

Petroleum companies have used carbon dioxide in oil production for more than 30 years. Tenaska has developed four other electricity plants in Texas.

The proposed Tenaska project near Sweetwater, Texas, would capture as much as 90 percent of the plant’s carbon dioxide and force it into the Permian Basin, an underground zone rich in petroleum, to boost production there by more than $1 billion worth of oil per year.

Tenaska filed for a permit Tuesday from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said David Fiorelli, president and CEO of Tenaska’s business development group. The plant would generate up to 600 megawatts, enough power for about 600,000 homes, starting in 2014.

The plant, to be on a 1,919-acre site north of Interstate 20 in Nolan County, would cost more than $3 billion and provide up to 2,000 jobs at peak construction and more than 100 permanent jobs during operation.

Tenaska said it expects to make a final decision on the project in 2009, depending on government incentives, cost estimates, market prices for electricity and carbon dioxide, and other factors.

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