Inside Energy’s Holy Grail
The British inventor eyeing the impossible ... costless carbon capture
Rodney Allam is a softly spoken Englishman of the old school. He does his maths with pen and paper. He uses a slide rule. Yet if anybody can mitigate the “fat-tail” risk of irreversible climate damage over the next 20 years, it is this septuagenarian inventor in his garden near Bath.
We will find out within months whether his untested “Allam Cycle” can achieve the impossible: to extract CO2 emissions from a fossil fuel power plant at no extra cost.
If vindicated, all new gas plants built in China, India, the developing world, could soon be carbon neutral, with coal plants following in a second phase. To Mr Allam’s astonishment, his revolutionary idea was picked up by a US technology group called 8 Rivers Capital, specialising in “Moon-shot” projects. “It came out of the blue,” he said.
He abandoned retirement – it lasted a weekend – and drew up a plan for what would become NET Power. Toshiba, Exelon, and CB&I bought into the idea. Momentum has been unstoppable ever since.
The first 50 megawatt gas plant is nearly finished outside Houston, the epicentre of the US petrochemical industry. The plant stands out because it has no smokestacks, and that is the point. Normal combined cycle gas plants vent excess heat into the air and lose 40pc of the energy. NET Power is a closed loop. All is conserved.
Mr Allam discovered the concept in the obscure Thirties notes of Russian scientists, who were nearly all killed in the Second World War. The plant relies on an “oxy-combustion” system that burns natural gas with pure oxygen, rather than with air.
The twist is that it harnesses carbon dioxide itself as a fuel. This C02 circulates constantly in a supercritical state, generating a surplus that is drained away in usable form for industry.
The residual CO2 has value. It sells for $20 (£15) a ton in the US for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), a way to extract more crude from ageing fields. It can be used to enhance concrete. Ultimately the excess CO2 will have to be stored underground in depleted aquifers, commercially viable in the future if world carbon prices ratchet up towards $50 a tonne.
Bill Brown, the entrepreneur behind the venture, is a former Morgan Stanley banker, aged 62, who has sunk all his private wealth into NET Power. “It is a crazy thing to do so close to retirement,” he told me in Texas.
Mr Brown is convinced that the plant can generate electricity at $0.06 per kilowatt hour, matching the best combined cycle gas plants. “We have zero marginal net cost. We can help the world meet climate targets without paying a penny more for electricity. People think the story must be too good to be true,” he said.
Prof Howard Herzog, a veteran expert on carbon capture at MIT, says much can go wrong. “First let us see if it works and what the costs are, and you never know until you actually do it. Nobody has ever tried this before and it is very tricky. I have been around long enough to see a lot of over-hyped technologies come to nothing,” he said.
Supercritical CO2 – at high pressure and at 1150 degrees – is hard to handle. Toshiba’s turbine needs special blades. There are extra costs separating oxygen from air. “NET Power is still the best thing out there in carbon capture. They are doing it commercially with private money and that’s commendable,” he said.
Existing carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects are too expensive. Saskpower in Canada loses 18pc of the power as “parasitic load” on its pilot project, a carbon capture tower bolted on to a coal-fired plant. Southern Power has suspended its pioneering venture in Mississippi, $4bn over budget and three years late. This plant has capture built into the system but the problem remains the same: extra kit for CCS costs money; a fifth of the power is lost.
Mr Allam concluded long ago that carbon capture will never gain acceptance worldwide until it reaches cost parity. He has since bent every sinew finding a way to do it.
He spent his career in Air Products and Chemicals where he first researched carbon capture in the Seventies to boost oil extraction from the North Sea.
He returned to the theme with redoubled passion after working for the British government on climate policy, and becoming the lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report on CCS.
NET Power had hoped to build its trial plant in Britain but was defeated by EU state aid rules. “We could not get a waver to treat it as a research project,” said the company spokesman.
The group is eyeing the UK for future plants. They dovetail with Britain’s reliance on liquefied natural gas (LNG). The extreme coldness of LNG can be harnessed by the process to make oxygen.
Prof Jon Gibbins, from Sheffield University, says Britain is a perfect fit. The NET Power plant has a high “UK content”. Heatric makes the boilers. Goodwin Steel Castings makes the high pressure turbine casing.
Britain will need another 10 gigawatts of gas power by the early 2030s as coal plants are shut down. The Committee on Climate Change says half of these require CCS. Unlike nuclear, the power is “dispatchable”: it can be switched on and off easily to balance the intermittency of offshore wind.
The obvious site is Teesside, home to 58pc of Britain’s chemical industry and five of the UK’S top 25 Co2emitting plants. There is already a network of pipelines out to North Sea wells. Few other spots in the world combine an industrial hub on this scale with accessible CO2 storage.
This mix could prove a bonanza as climate rules bite and competitive advantage shifts to those with the cheapest zero-emission power. The heavy industries of the Ruhr Valley will be in trouble if they cannot dispose of carbon.
The Teesside Collective is betting heavily on CCS as their path to revival, with the backing of Lord Oxburgh’s cross-party report to Parliament. His inquiry concluded that costs would fall below £85 Mw/hour by the late 2020s if CCS was launched on a big enough scale. But this was before NET Power came along. The Allam Cycle promises zero-emission power for something closer to £60 in Britain.
Hardline climate sceptics and hardline eco-warriors from Greenpeace – unholy allies, as so often in ideological wars – both argue that CCS “doesn’t work”. Mr Allam is determined to prove them both wrong. If he pulls it off, perhaps they will apologise.
‘We can help the world meet climate targets without paying a penny more for electricity’