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2007-03-13
The TXU Corporation announced on Friday that it was making plans to build two power plants in Texas that would use advanced technology intended to capture carbon dioxide before it escapes into the atmosphere.

The plan for the so-called integrated gasification combined cycle, or I.G.C.C., plants comes almost two weeks after TXU announced that several private equity groups led by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and the Texas Pacific Group proposed to acquire TXU for $45 billion.

Before the deal was announced, TXU, the largest utility in Texas, had proposed building 11 coal-fired plants to meet the state’s growing energy needs, but none would have included the new cleaner technology. Under growing pressure from senior Texas politicians and environmental groups, the company shelved eight of the plants under the terms of the buyout deal, leaving a hole in the state’s future energy capacity.

The planning for the two new clean-coal generators would potentially help fill the gap for a state where the population is expected to grow by 20 percent, to nearly 30 million people, over the next decade. But it also may signal a shift in the thinking of utilities that depend on coal to generate energy to try to develop a challenging technology that is accompanied by high construction costs.

These plants would convert coal to gas and separate the carbon dioxide, which would then be injected into existing oil fields. Nationwide, there are applications to build about 25 such generators, but that represents a small fraction of the proposed coal-fired plants. So far none have been built anywhere in the world.

“It’s time to start exploring how we bring better technology to Texas so we can generate clean, affordable, reliable power in the future,” Michael MacDougall, a Texas Pacific Group partner, said in a statement announcing the planning for the new generators.

TXU, which is based in Dallas, said it would seek proposals from companies developing the new technology and would consult leading environmentalists while considering bids. “This project is further evidence of TXU’s new commitment to move forward immediately to develop the next generation of low-cost, clean-burning technologies,” said Mike Childers, chief executive of TXU Generation Development.

A study by the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “The Future of Coal in a Carbon-Constrained World,” scheduled for release next week, points to the importance of the kind of effort that TXU now says it embraces.

According to a draft circulated for peer review, carbon dioxide capture and sequestration is the critical technology that would reduce emissions significantly while also allowing coal to meet the world’s pressing energy needs.

But pumping the carbon dioxide into old oil fields has limited significance for long-term, large-scale carbon dioxide sequestration, the report says, because the amount to be sequestered is so much larger than the available oil field capacity. For example, sequestering the carbon dioxide globally from 600 coal plants of 1,000 megawatts each (a bit more than double what the United States has now) would require injecting about 50 million barrels a day back into the ground. In comparison, the world pumps a little more than 80 million barrels a day.

Under the previous management, TXU had argued that gasification would not work well on the local coal, which is lignite, because its moisture content is high and it takes more energy to turn into gas. But the announcement on Friday is for one plant to run on local coal and the other on coal brought in from the Powder River Basin.

The plants would be built in West Texas, the site of the old oil fields that could make use of the carbon dioxide. They might go at some of the sites of the eight plants that TXU agreed to cancel, said David Hawkins, a climate expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Mr. Hawkins acknowledged, however, that issuing a request for proposals did not guarantee that the plants would actually be built.

“If we’d had our druthers, the first request for proposals would have been for efficiency, for negawatts,” he said. “Negawatt” is a term popularized by Amory Lovins, an efficiency expert, meaning megawatts that are not needed because of technical changes that hold down demand.

Mr. Lovins says the term originated in a typographical error in a public utilities filing in Colorado. Putting the captured carbon dioxide into old oil fields allows the production of more oil, which releases more carbon dioxide when it is burned.

But Mr. Hawkins said that his group’s assumption is that if the oil were not produced from old fields in West Texas, it would be produced in the Middle East, or from environmentally fragile areas in the United States, so that all that changed was the place where the oil was produced, and not total oil production. Producing more oil domestically, however, does increase global supplies and help hold down prices, which could stimulate consumption. Mr. Hawkins said that the longer-term solution was a cap on carbon emissions.
(By Clifford Krauss and Matthew L. Wald, NYT, 10/03/2007)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/business/10coal.html?_r=1&ref=environment&oref=slogin

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