NRG halts carbon capture project at Fort Bend coal plant amid virus
The power company NRG Energy built the world’s largest carbon capture facility three years ago at its coal plant in Fort Bend County but mothballed the operation in May, as low crude prices thwarted the oil-production efforts of the project.
The Petra Nova project used carbon capture technology to reduce carbon emissions at one unit of the W.A. Parish Generating Station south of Sugar Land by 90 percent, according to NRG’s website, the equivalent of taking 350,000 cars off the road each day. The Parish plant has eight units — four powered by coal, four by natural gas.
Halting the operation means the previously captured carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere and increases worldwide temperatures, is again escaping into the atmosphere at the Parish generating station. The carbon-capture facility can be brought back online when economics improve, NRG spokeswoman Pat Hammond said. Meanwhile, the Parish units are equipped with emission controls and meet all federal and state environmental rules and regulations, NRG says.
Petra Nova, which was funded by a $195 million Energy Department grant, was part of a wider effort to find new ways to capture carbon and use it for commercial purposes.
Backers say such efforts help reduce greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming, including Earth’s warmest year on record in 2019. Power companies say they’re working to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases they emit, and NRG says it has accelerated its commitment, promising to cut carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2025, Hammond said.
For clean coal advocates, who tout the ways coal can be used in an environmentally friendly way, the Petra Nova project was a shining example, said Daniel Cohan, associate professor of environmental engineering at Rice University.
The project, which NRG owns and operated with JX Nippon Oil and Gas Exploration of Japan, captured carbon dioxide from a 240-megawatt stream of exhaust from one of the units of the Parish plant. The captured carbon was moved through a pipeline to the West Ranch oil field southwest of Houston, where it was pumped into the ground and used to boost oil production. Within the first year, the system helped boost oil production to more than 4,000 barrels a day from just 300 barrels a day, NRG said.
This year’s oil bust, driven by plunging demand caused by lockdowns aimed at reducing spread of the coronavirus, reduced the need for further oil output.
But even with Petra Nova, Cohan said, most of the CO2 emissions were being released from the plant, which he said is among the top sulfur emitters in the country. The plant indirectly causes more deaths — about 170 his research shows — than any other coal plant in Texas, Cohan said, as the sulfur emissions increase incidents of heart attacks, strokes and other diseases.
Some environmentalists are concerned that the project’s halt is a sign that Texas is regressing in its attempts to improve air quality. Carbon emissions, one environmental advocate said, threaten Texans by causing climate change that is blamed for producing stronger hurricanes such as Hurricane Harvey and recordsetting heat waves.
“Now more than ever with people concerned with public health, we should be acting to reduce our carbon emissions, not increasing them,” said Emma Pabst, global warming solutions associate with the advocacy group Environment Texas.