RECS Day 4 - Visit to the National Carbon Capture Center
RECS 2011 in front of the NCCC
June 9th - The RECS group was greeted by Kerry Bowers (Southern Company), Director of the National Carbon Capture Center (NCCC), a facility established in 2009 by the U.S. DOE that is operated by Southern Company. The NCCC works collaboratively with technology developers worldwide to test and evaluate both pre- and post-combustion carbon capture technologies. Because the facility operates under a wide range of flow rates and process conditions, research at the NCCC effectively evaluates technologies at various levels of maturity with the aim to help accelerate commercial deployment. To date, the NCCC has entered into testing agreements with Aker Clean Carbon AS and Babcock & Wilcox Power Generation Group.
Kerry Bowers (Southern Company), Director of the NCCC provides an introductory lecture on CO2 capture and the NCCC strategy and operations
Following Kerry Bowers’ talk, Randall Rush (Southern Company) emphasized the scale of the engineering challenge associated with CCS deployment and the importance of understanding project economics. He then provided an overview of the Transport Integrated Gasification (TRIG™) technology developed by Southern and KBR at the NCCC predecessor (Power Systems Development Facility) and its current application to the Kemper County Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) Project. The project, currently under construction, will be operated by Mississippi Power and includes pre-combustion CO2 capture of about 3 million tons of CO2 per year using Selexol (physical solvent), pipeline transport about 70 miles and storage via CO2 EOR in an oilfield operated by Denbury Resources. Plant start up is expected in May 2014.
Carrie Petrik-Huff (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Dani Petrucci (U.S. DOE)
Before the RECS group toured the NCCC, Dr. Gary Rochelle who directs the Luminant Carbon Management Program at the University of Texas at Austin, focused on CO2 capture by adsorption/stripping with aqueous monoethanolamine (MEA) as the benchmark technology for addressing CO2 emissions from existing coal-fired power plants.
