This is for Mr Magoo and his Malthusian asshole buddy- the former President who happens to be about as expert on coal as he is.
Yes thats right -extremely price competitive and scaleable 100% carbon sequestration/regeneration being commercialized now.
And since the US is the Saudi Arabia of Coal we should be set for a massive growth spurt over the next several decades.
Forbes Magazine 2/28/17
Revolutionary Power Plant Captures All Its Carbon Emissions, At No Extra Cost
Christopher Helman , FORBES STAFF
From Texas, I cover the energy sector and the tycoons who control it.
Net Power's Rodney Allam stands astride his creation: a power plant that captures its own carbon, at no extra cost. (Photo by Michael Thad Carter, for Forbes).
Green Gas: the Allam Cycle technology promises a future of emissions-free fossil fuels.
GROWING UP IN ENGLAND after World War II, "all the youngsters like me were obsessed with aircraft," says Rodney Allam. "I had a picture on my wall of Chuck Yeager when he broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1, the earliest turbine-driven aircraft." Those high-powered machines were inspirational. Allam became a chemical engineer and went to work at the U.K. division of Air Products & Chemicals, based in Allentown, Pennsylvania. There in the 1970s, he became obsessed with an idea: how to capture the carbon-dioxide emissions from the U.K.'s giant coal-burning power plants? He already knew where to put the CO2. BP and Royal Dutch Shell would jump at the chance to inject it into their vast oilfields in the North Sea. Injecting the gas (which acts as a solvent to free up stubborn crude oil) has long been a common practice in West Texas fields, where oil companies tap naturally occurring reservoirs of CO2. But there were none of those in England.
Allam explored various bolt-on methods to grab the CO2 from a giant 2,400-megawatt coal plant in Scotland. But none came close to viability. For a simple reason: They were too expensive. He became obsessed with making carbon capture affordable: first for the technical challenge and then out of an impetus to slow CO2 induced global warming. "I tried like hell," he says, "but I gave it up in the early 1990s--couldn't make it work."
But now he has. In December, Allam, 76, flew from his home in the U.K. to meet Forbes at a construction site in Texas near the Houston Ship Channel, the heart of the nation's largest petrochemical complex. When completed early this year, at a cost of about $150 million, these 5 acres of steel and concrete, pipes, tanks and high-voltage lines will become the proving ground for a technology called the Allam Cycle. It's a novel electric-generation system that burns natural gas and captures all the produced carbon dioxide. The best part is that it makes electricity at the same low cost as other modern gas-fired turbines--about 6 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Environmentalists are hopeful. "It's not just a bridge, it's a destination," says John Thompson, who directs the carbon-capture program at the Clean Air Task Force. Renewable energy sources haven't scaled fast enough to replace fossil fuels, and zero-carbon nuclear is too expensive. "We're going to have to use fossil fuels in the future whether we like it or not," Allam says. "The challenge will be in using fossil fuels to produce electricity without emitting CO2 into the atmosphere."
Allam left Air Products in 2005 after 44 years. In 2009, he got a call from 8 Rivers, a venture capital incubator in Durham, North Carolina. Bill Brown, 8 Rivers' cofounder, saw piles of federal Recovery Act money available for research on carbon capture and sequestration. It wasn't hard to rev Allam up again. Soon he was sending handwritten brain dumps to the cadre of young engineers at 8 Rivers. Within six months, Allam completed the design.
Rodney Allam. (Photo by Michael Thad Carter, for Forbes.)
8 Rivers worked with engineering powerhouses Fluor and Babcock & Wilcox to refine and verify the tech. Brown, formerly of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, presented it to whoever would listen. "Nobody believed us," Brown says. "They thought I was selling snake oil." They had reason to doubt. Bolt-on systems for carbon capture exist, but they reduce efficiency. And they're expensive; Southern Co. is $4 billion overbudget so far on its "clean coal" plant in Mississippi. "Companies don't want to just slap a box on the back of a power plant," says Julio Friedmann, carbon-capture expert at Livermore National Laboratory. "They want an integrated solution."
Which is what the Allam Cycle gives them. To understand what this cycle is, start with what it isn't. Most power plants that burn coal or natural gas use the heat to create steam that goes through a turbine, spins rotors and creates electricity. In many generators, half the useful heat shoots into the atmosphere along with steam and, of course, carbon dioxide. Allam's cycle doesn't use steam. Instead, the so-called working fluid that turns the turbine is carbon dioxide itself. The CO2, under pressure and heated to a manageable 1,000 degrees, is kept in a supercritical state, in which it can expand to fill its container like a gas, yet has the density of a liquid. Instead of pouring into the sky, that CO2 gets cycled in a loop, spinning the turbines that power the generators. Combustion continually adds additional CO2, while excess CO2 is directed off into a pipeline.
Power generator Exelon ($35 billion revenues) saw the potential and became an equity partner after months of due diligence. "We usually don't make investments this far upstream," says Ron DeGregorio, president of Exelon Power. He'll be spending many billions in the coming years to upgrade Exelon's vast fleet of aging power plants.
The third equal partner in the company, which is now called Net Power, is publicly traded engineering giant CB&I (a.k.a. Chicago Bridge & Iron). Since 2012, NetPower, which will own the new Houston facility, has been working with Toshiba to engineer and build the combustor system for the first Allam Cycle plant--an R&D effort that has cost the Japanese company at least $200 million, which it plans to recoup as orders roll in.
A full-size Net Power plant will generate 300MW and 800,000 tons of CO2 per year and cost around $300 million to build. "The plan is to build these in oil regions, then transport the power," says Daniel McCarthy, head of tech investments at CB&I. "If you can generate power without carbon dioxide and with no economic penalty versus existing technology, why wouldn't you do that?" It'll take a few months of operation before Net Power can prove the stability of the cycle. Allam predicts his invention will soon sell itself: "In a year we will know for sure."
***
Senior Editor Chris Helman is based in Houston, Texas. Contact him on Twitter @chrishelman.
Forbes.com March 30, 2017
Who Needs Nuclear? Toshiba Is Developing A New Zero-Carbon Power Source
Christopher Helman , FORBES STAFF
From Texas, I cover the energy sector and the tycoons who control it. told reporters yesterday that Toshiba had a “moral commitment” not to walk away from the unfinished reactors at the Vogtle Plant.
President Satoshi Tsunakawa made clear yesterday Toshiba's commitment is to shareholders, and to stop throwing good money after bad. Toshiba has taken $9 billion in write downs and will owe billions more on the nuke projects. “We are willing to pay what we are obligated to,” said Toshiba's CFO. But after that, they're done with nuclear power. The company has said it intends to have Westinghouse off its financial statements within a year.
Toshiba is giving up on nukes, but it’s not giving up on zero-carbon energy. The company’s thermal power group has invested five years and $250 million to develop an all new natural gas combustion system that may solve the fossil fuel Holy Grail — it captures all of its carbon dioxide emissions, at no extra cost. The technology behind it is called the Allam Cycle, after its inventor Rodney Allam. The first 50 mw Allam plant, featuring Toshiba’s technology, is now in commissioning near Houston.
I wrote about Allam in this magazine story earlier this year, and described the technology like this:
To understand what this cycle is, start with what it isn’t. Most power plants that burn coal or natural gas use the heat to create steam that goes through a turbine, spins rotors and creates electricity. In many generators, half the useful heat shoots into the atmosphere along with steam and, of course, carbon dioxide. Allam’s cycle doesn’t use steam. Instead, the so-called working fluid that turns the turbine is carbon dioxide itself. The CO2, under pressure and heated to a manageable 1,000 degrees, is kept in a super-critical state, in which it can expand to fill its container like a gas, yet has the density of a liquid. Instead of pouring into the sky, that CO2 gets cycled in a loop, spinning the turbines that power the generators. Combustion continually adds additional CO2, while excess CO2 is directed off into a pipeline.
NetPower, the company Allam works for, partnered with Toshiba, which built its carbon dioxide turbine using elements of both advanced steam and gas turbines. Toshiba’s combustor component represents the heart of the system. The one it built for this first 50 mw plant was purposefully several sizes too big; Toshiba was already looking out to commercialization. A 300 mw plant would cost about $300 million to build. Compared with nuclear the approvals and permits would be a breeze. And unlike other coal, gas and nuke plants, the Allam Cycle doesn’t require any outside source of water.
And what to do with the captured CO2? The best option is to stick it in old oilfields. For decades oil companies in Texas have injected pressurized carbon dioxide down into depleted oil reservoirs. The CO2 helps to dissolve more oil out of the oil-soaked rock. The rule of thumb has long been that for every incremental barrel of oil that comes out, you trap 20 tons of carbon dioxide in the rock. For ever. Not only does the scheme result in carbon-free electricity, but the resulting oil has a low production cost of less than $20 per barrel, making it economic in almost any price environment. The CO2 currently used to revive old oil fields comes from naturally occuring sources. It would be no trouble for them to use CO2 from a power plant. Also near Houston, NRG Energy recently bolted onto an old coal-burning plant a $1 billion system that captures CO2 and sends it to a oilfield operated by billionaire Jeff Hildebrand’s Hilcorp. (My story here.) In the Permian Basin of west Texas, Occidental Petroleum produces 150,000 barrels per day from CO2 floods. There’s enough old oilfields in Texas alone to slurp the CO2 from more than 100 Allam Cycle plants.
Southern Company is unlikely to abandon the Vogtle project, predicts Credit Suisse utilities analyst Michael Weinstein in a note this morning. However Scana, the South Carolina utility also building two Westinghouse reactors, has floated the idea of walking away from nuclear and just building some cheap, reliable, low-carbon natural gas turbines instead. Which brings us to the real reason why new nuclear has (so far) failed in America. Natural gas is cheap, just $3 per million BTU. Put it in oil-equivalent terms, and it costs just $18 a barrel. And it’s all over the place. The last decade has seen myriad discoveries in shale rocks like the Marcellus, Eagle Ford, Utica, Haynesville, Fayetteville, Barnett, and on and on. When you it burn natural gas to generate power you emit just 2/3 as much carbon as burning coal. Switching from coal to gas accounts for nearly all the drop in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, from a peak of 5 billion metric tons in 2007 to about 4.2 billion today.
Even with President Trump making moves to roll back Obama’s Clean Power Plan, individual states will continue to care enough about emissions to push ever tougher low-carbon energy standards. Breakthroughs like the Allam Cycle can help continue to provide the same high quality, baseload zero-carbon power that today only comes from nuclear reactors -- and can help Toshiba atone for its Westinghouse debacle.
***
Senior Editor Chris Helman is based in Houston, Texas. Contact him on Twitter @chrishelman.
Yes thats right -extremely price competitive and scaleable 100% carbon sequestration/regeneration being commercialized now.
And since the US is the Saudi Arabia of Coal we should be set for a massive growth spurt over the next several decades.
Forbes Magazine 2/28/17
Revolutionary Power Plant Captures All Its Carbon Emissions, At No Extra Cost
Christopher Helman , FORBES STAFF
From Texas, I cover the energy sector and the tycoons who control it.
Net Power's Rodney Allam stands astride his creation: a power plant that captures its own carbon, at no extra cost. (Photo by Michael Thad Carter, for Forbes).
Green Gas: the Allam Cycle technology promises a future of emissions-free fossil fuels.
GROWING UP IN ENGLAND after World War II, "all the youngsters like me were obsessed with aircraft," says Rodney Allam. "I had a picture on my wall of Chuck Yeager when he broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1, the earliest turbine-driven aircraft." Those high-powered machines were inspirational. Allam became a chemical engineer and went to work at the U.K. division of Air Products & Chemicals, based in Allentown, Pennsylvania. There in the 1970s, he became obsessed with an idea: how to capture the carbon-dioxide emissions from the U.K.'s giant coal-burning power plants? He already knew where to put the CO2. BP and Royal Dutch Shell would jump at the chance to inject it into their vast oilfields in the North Sea. Injecting the gas (which acts as a solvent to free up stubborn crude oil) has long been a common practice in West Texas fields, where oil companies tap naturally occurring reservoirs of CO2. But there were none of those in England.
Allam explored various bolt-on methods to grab the CO2 from a giant 2,400-megawatt coal plant in Scotland. But none came close to viability. For a simple reason: They were too expensive. He became obsessed with making carbon capture affordable: first for the technical challenge and then out of an impetus to slow CO2 induced global warming. "I tried like hell," he says, "but I gave it up in the early 1990s--couldn't make it work."
But now he has. In December, Allam, 76, flew from his home in the U.K. to meet Forbes at a construction site in Texas near the Houston Ship Channel, the heart of the nation's largest petrochemical complex. When completed early this year, at a cost of about $150 million, these 5 acres of steel and concrete, pipes, tanks and high-voltage lines will become the proving ground for a technology called the Allam Cycle. It's a novel electric-generation system that burns natural gas and captures all the produced carbon dioxide. The best part is that it makes electricity at the same low cost as other modern gas-fired turbines--about 6 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Environmentalists are hopeful. "It's not just a bridge, it's a destination," says John Thompson, who directs the carbon-capture program at the Clean Air Task Force. Renewable energy sources haven't scaled fast enough to replace fossil fuels, and zero-carbon nuclear is too expensive. "We're going to have to use fossil fuels in the future whether we like it or not," Allam says. "The challenge will be in using fossil fuels to produce electricity without emitting CO2 into the atmosphere."
Allam left Air Products in 2005 after 44 years. In 2009, he got a call from 8 Rivers, a venture capital incubator in Durham, North Carolina. Bill Brown, 8 Rivers' cofounder, saw piles of federal Recovery Act money available for research on carbon capture and sequestration. It wasn't hard to rev Allam up again. Soon he was sending handwritten brain dumps to the cadre of young engineers at 8 Rivers. Within six months, Allam completed the design.
Rodney Allam. (Photo by Michael Thad Carter, for Forbes.)
8 Rivers worked with engineering powerhouses Fluor and Babcock & Wilcox to refine and verify the tech. Brown, formerly of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, presented it to whoever would listen. "Nobody believed us," Brown says. "They thought I was selling snake oil." They had reason to doubt. Bolt-on systems for carbon capture exist, but they reduce efficiency. And they're expensive; Southern Co. is $4 billion overbudget so far on its "clean coal" plant in Mississippi. "Companies don't want to just slap a box on the back of a power plant," says Julio Friedmann, carbon-capture expert at Livermore National Laboratory. "They want an integrated solution."
Which is what the Allam Cycle gives them. To understand what this cycle is, start with what it isn't. Most power plants that burn coal or natural gas use the heat to create steam that goes through a turbine, spins rotors and creates electricity. In many generators, half the useful heat shoots into the atmosphere along with steam and, of course, carbon dioxide. Allam's cycle doesn't use steam. Instead, the so-called working fluid that turns the turbine is carbon dioxide itself. The CO2, under pressure and heated to a manageable 1,000 degrees, is kept in a supercritical state, in which it can expand to fill its container like a gas, yet has the density of a liquid. Instead of pouring into the sky, that CO2 gets cycled in a loop, spinning the turbines that power the generators. Combustion continually adds additional CO2, while excess CO2 is directed off into a pipeline.
Power generator Exelon ($35 billion revenues) saw the potential and became an equity partner after months of due diligence. "We usually don't make investments this far upstream," says Ron DeGregorio, president of Exelon Power. He'll be spending many billions in the coming years to upgrade Exelon's vast fleet of aging power plants.
The third equal partner in the company, which is now called Net Power, is publicly traded engineering giant CB&I (a.k.a. Chicago Bridge & Iron). Since 2012, NetPower, which will own the new Houston facility, has been working with Toshiba to engineer and build the combustor system for the first Allam Cycle plant--an R&D effort that has cost the Japanese company at least $200 million, which it plans to recoup as orders roll in.
A full-size Net Power plant will generate 300MW and 800,000 tons of CO2 per year and cost around $300 million to build. "The plan is to build these in oil regions, then transport the power," says Daniel McCarthy, head of tech investments at CB&I. "If you can generate power without carbon dioxide and with no economic penalty versus existing technology, why wouldn't you do that?" It'll take a few months of operation before Net Power can prove the stability of the cycle. Allam predicts his invention will soon sell itself: "In a year we will know for sure."
***
Senior Editor Chris Helman is based in Houston, Texas. Contact him on Twitter @chrishelman.
Forbes.com March 30, 2017
Who Needs Nuclear? Toshiba Is Developing A New Zero-Carbon Power Source
Christopher Helman , FORBES STAFF
From Texas, I cover the energy sector and the tycoons who control it. told reporters yesterday that Toshiba had a “moral commitment” not to walk away from the unfinished reactors at the Vogtle Plant.
President Satoshi Tsunakawa made clear yesterday Toshiba's commitment is to shareholders, and to stop throwing good money after bad. Toshiba has taken $9 billion in write downs and will owe billions more on the nuke projects. “We are willing to pay what we are obligated to,” said Toshiba's CFO. But after that, they're done with nuclear power. The company has said it intends to have Westinghouse off its financial statements within a year.
Toshiba is giving up on nukes, but it’s not giving up on zero-carbon energy. The company’s thermal power group has invested five years and $250 million to develop an all new natural gas combustion system that may solve the fossil fuel Holy Grail — it captures all of its carbon dioxide emissions, at no extra cost. The technology behind it is called the Allam Cycle, after its inventor Rodney Allam. The first 50 mw Allam plant, featuring Toshiba’s technology, is now in commissioning near Houston.
I wrote about Allam in this magazine story earlier this year, and described the technology like this:
To understand what this cycle is, start with what it isn’t. Most power plants that burn coal or natural gas use the heat to create steam that goes through a turbine, spins rotors and creates electricity. In many generators, half the useful heat shoots into the atmosphere along with steam and, of course, carbon dioxide. Allam’s cycle doesn’t use steam. Instead, the so-called working fluid that turns the turbine is carbon dioxide itself. The CO2, under pressure and heated to a manageable 1,000 degrees, is kept in a super-critical state, in which it can expand to fill its container like a gas, yet has the density of a liquid. Instead of pouring into the sky, that CO2 gets cycled in a loop, spinning the turbines that power the generators. Combustion continually adds additional CO2, while excess CO2 is directed off into a pipeline.
NetPower, the company Allam works for, partnered with Toshiba, which built its carbon dioxide turbine using elements of both advanced steam and gas turbines. Toshiba’s combustor component represents the heart of the system. The one it built for this first 50 mw plant was purposefully several sizes too big; Toshiba was already looking out to commercialization. A 300 mw plant would cost about $300 million to build. Compared with nuclear the approvals and permits would be a breeze. And unlike other coal, gas and nuke plants, the Allam Cycle doesn’t require any outside source of water.
And what to do with the captured CO2? The best option is to stick it in old oilfields. For decades oil companies in Texas have injected pressurized carbon dioxide down into depleted oil reservoirs. The CO2 helps to dissolve more oil out of the oil-soaked rock. The rule of thumb has long been that for every incremental barrel of oil that comes out, you trap 20 tons of carbon dioxide in the rock. For ever. Not only does the scheme result in carbon-free electricity, but the resulting oil has a low production cost of less than $20 per barrel, making it economic in almost any price environment. The CO2 currently used to revive old oil fields comes from naturally occuring sources. It would be no trouble for them to use CO2 from a power plant. Also near Houston, NRG Energy recently bolted onto an old coal-burning plant a $1 billion system that captures CO2 and sends it to a oilfield operated by billionaire Jeff Hildebrand’s Hilcorp. (My story here.) In the Permian Basin of west Texas, Occidental Petroleum produces 150,000 barrels per day from CO2 floods. There’s enough old oilfields in Texas alone to slurp the CO2 from more than 100 Allam Cycle plants.
Southern Company is unlikely to abandon the Vogtle project, predicts Credit Suisse utilities analyst Michael Weinstein in a note this morning. However Scana, the South Carolina utility also building two Westinghouse reactors, has floated the idea of walking away from nuclear and just building some cheap, reliable, low-carbon natural gas turbines instead. Which brings us to the real reason why new nuclear has (so far) failed in America. Natural gas is cheap, just $3 per million BTU. Put it in oil-equivalent terms, and it costs just $18 a barrel. And it’s all over the place. The last decade has seen myriad discoveries in shale rocks like the Marcellus, Eagle Ford, Utica, Haynesville, Fayetteville, Barnett, and on and on. When you it burn natural gas to generate power you emit just 2/3 as much carbon as burning coal. Switching from coal to gas accounts for nearly all the drop in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, from a peak of 5 billion metric tons in 2007 to about 4.2 billion today.
Even with President Trump making moves to roll back Obama’s Clean Power Plan, individual states will continue to care enough about emissions to push ever tougher low-carbon energy standards. Breakthroughs like the Allam Cycle can help continue to provide the same high quality, baseload zero-carbon power that today only comes from nuclear reactors -- and can help Toshiba atone for its Westinghouse debacle.
***
Senior Editor Chris Helman is based in Houston, Texas. Contact him on Twitter @chrishelman.
