The geothermal well in the Morgantown Industrial Park, which began drilling in mid May, has so far reached 1,300 feet in depth but aims to ultimately drill down 15,000 feet to determine viability of geothermal in the region.
West Virginia University (WVU) is digging deep to learn more about alternative energy and carbon capture.
The geothermal well in the Morgantown Industrial Park, which began drilling in mid-May, has so far reached 1,300 feet in depth.
The project aims to ultimately drill down 15,000 feet to determine if the increasing heat at such depths is viable for future use as a clean energy source across the region.
Shikha Sharma, a geology professor at WVU and the project’s primary investigator, said this specialized drilling is only the second of its kind in the country, and first in West Virginia.
“We are not only assessing the geothermal potential of the rocks beneath us here in West Virginia, we will be going pretty deep,” she said. “We’ll also be collecting rocks, sidewall course, to assess the potential of CO2 storage in the shallow formations. Combining both things together is pretty unique.”
The project is a collaboration between several entities, but most notably the WVU Energy Institute with WVU faculty, Northeast Natural Energy and the U.S. Department of Energy.
They hope to have their first rock samples by July and regular temperature data by the end of the year.
Sharma said depending on the study’s results, West Virginia could be well positioned to use geothermal as a renewable source of energy and heat.
“A lot of skill sets required for drilling oil and gas wells goes into developing geothermal,” she said. “We can retool a lot of those technologies, and level up geothermal as a renewable energy technology. I think that’s another major advantage for oil and gas states like West Virginia.”
The plant was announced in September, but the location wasn’t revealed until Monday.
Competitive Power Ventures said Monday that it had selected Doddridge County as the site for its planned 1,800-megawatt, combined cycle natural gas plant.
The plant represents a $3 billion investment and will be among the first in the nation to use carbon capture and storage to reduce the plant’s carbon emissions.
The company says the plant’s construction will require 2,000 skilled workers.
At the federal level, a tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act made the plant more economical. At the state level, West Virginia lawmakers this year enacted rules for carbon capture.
At the local level, county officials approved a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreement.
The company says the plant will be called the CPV Shay Energy Center. Shay is a type of geared steam locomotive that powered timber hauling railroads in West Virginia. Several are preserved and operating at the Cass Scenic Railroad State Park.
The plant will generate power for the PJM regional market, which includes West Virginia and 12 other Eastern states.
Competitive Energy Partners announced Friday that it would build the 1,800-megawatt plant at a location to be determined.
Updated Sept. 16 at 2:30 p.m.
A Maryland energy company plans to build a natural gas power plant in West Virginia that would capture and store its carbon dioxide emissions underground.
Competitive Power Ventures announced Friday that it would build the 1,800-megawatt plant at a location yet to be determined.
It will supply power to PJM, a regional electricity operator in parts of 13 states, including West Virginia.
The plant, which would go into operation later in the decade, is one of the first to qualify for an expanded tax credit for carbon capture under the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act.
U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, was a primary architect of the legislation.
In addition to the federal law, West Virginia recently enacted a state law setting rules for carbon capture.
The plant’s construction will put about 1,000 people to work, according to the company. Hundreds of additional jobs will be created in natural gas production.
The plant will use a combined cycle, which uses the hot exhaust gasses from the initial burning of natural gas to produce additional power. It’s a more efficient process.
The carbon capture system would remove 90 to 95 percent of the carbon dioxide from the plant’s waste stream, said Competitive Power Ventures CEO Gary Lambert.
The company will receive a tax credit for each ton of CO2 removed.
This story has been updated to say the plant’s location is yet to be determined.
State lawmakers wrapped up energy related legislation in the final hours of the session, including a bill to create a Mining Mutual Insurance Company.
The Senate unanimously approved the final version of Senate Bill 1 on Saturday, and it becomes effective immediately when the governor signs it.
SB 1 creates a five-member board to manage at least $50 million in taxpayer funds. Those funds would back mine reclamation bonds.
An audit last year found that the state’s special reclamation fund was not adequate to cover future mine cleanup obligations, potentially exposing the state to hundreds of millions of dollars in liabilities.
Senate President Craig Blair identified SB 1 as one of his top priorities, and in a rare move, he sponsored the bill.
Advanced Batteries
The House sent House Bill 4025 back to the Senate late Saturday with an amendment removed, but the chamber didn’t act on it before the session expired.
The bill would have exempted rare earth minerals mined in the state from severance taxes. Its supporters say that will encourage the development of advanced battery technology for use in electric vehicles and storage batteries for renewable energy.
Carbon Storage
Both chambers finished action earlier this month on House Bill 4491, with the Senate agreeing unanimously to the legislation.
HB 4491 will create a permitting system for underground carbon storage. The system could help carbon-intensive industries, such as power plants, steelmakers and cement companies, meet their carbon-reduction or net-zero goals.
The stored carbon could also be used in the future and meanwhile would not be released into the atmosphere.
Nuclear Power
Senate Bill 4 made it across the finish line and to the governor’s desk last month.
SB 4 repealed the state’s longstanding ban on the construction of new nuclear power facilities. The ban was enacted over concerns about nuclear safety and to protect the state’s coal industry from a competitor.
But times have changed. Gov. Jim Justice, a coal executive, signed the repeal. It will take effect on May 1, 2022.
Mine Safety
A bill to change the state’s mine safety code didn’t get very far.
House Bill 4840 would have made changes that Democrats, many Republicans and the United Mine Workers of America said would have weakened safety.
An intensive lobbying effort by mine workers and their allies effectively sidelined the legislation.
Wyoming traditionally has more coal production than West Virginia. The states are generally one and two nationally. But like the Mountain State, coal production in “Big Wyoming” has been on the decline for more than a decade. Even so, state leaders there are pinning their hopes on carbon capture technology.
The Carbon Valley podcast is a production of Wyoming Public Media.
Wyoming Public Media reporter Cooper McKim produced a nine-part podcast about the efforts in Wyoming. He spoke with Eric Douglas about what he learned.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Douglas: Tell me the basis for the podcast to begin with.
McKim: Coal production here has pretty much been on the decline since 2008. And job growth has gone with it. There have been several bankruptcies and the economy here relies on it for a majority of its revenue. Schools rely on it. It’s a little different than West Virginia, in that we get so many perks, basically from the minerals industry, it’s paid for so much, made the quality of life so good. And with that in mind, the primary effort has been keeping it going.
In 2008 there was this idea. A legislator from Gillette, our main coal capital, where all the mining is really happening, thought that carbon emissions, that carbon dioxide was the problem, but that if we could take care of that, maybe coal plants would stop going offline and coal demand would maintain. It didn’t really take off, because that recognizes climate change.
I wanted to take that idea, and just really explore how the idea of carbon capture took hold, because there’s this parallel of climate technology and keeping fossil fuels going. They seem like they’re going against each other, but they’re really not.
Douglas: It sounds like there was actually a program set up to encourage carbon capture projects. Was that funded by the state itself? Or where did that come from?
McKim: So there have been a bunch of different investments into carbon capture. And the main one was the integrated test center, which was basically a facility set up next to a coal plant here. And then they started a competition to be the first patent. The basis for the podcast was saying, let’s get a bunch of international companies to come to Wyoming and show that we can do this, to show that this is possible.
The investment was really into this facility. It was, I think, around $15 million. But there was also money from several utilities that went into it. And it was going to reward whoever produced the best technology. Carbon capture itself is trillions of dollars away from commercial viability.
Douglas: But it wasn’t just capturing the carbon emissions, it was trying to develop a system to capture the carbon emissions and then use the carbon as a byproduct as well. So you were trying to cut down on emissions, but also find a use for the material.
McKim: Yeah, so Gov. Matt Mead, the governor before our current one, had the idea that carbon capture and sequestration is great, but you’re just putting it underground. What are you doing with it? These things are expensive, so offsetting the cost by creating a different profit from another resource that it’s producing. Carbon capture utilization is sort of a sub industry of carbon capture. And that’s not trillions, but probably billions away from commercial viability. The only areas that it’s really working in right now is producing concrete from it and some are trying to produce sort of a renewable gas.
Douglas: So what did you find? What was the final result?
McKim: So what I found is that carbon capture is very different from how carbon capture helps coal. This industry itself could do very well and potentially affect net zero emissions. But the timeline for that is just different from the timeline for coal demand. That’s already been going down really fast. In Appalachia, it happened even sooner than it is here.
The reality is that things are moving really, really fast. And carbon capture is moving really, really slow. And so what this sort of exemplified is, we may not have enough time, and other people in the state want to look elsewhere to economically diversify in a way that is safer, is potentially a little bit broader, provides near term solutions, because it’s not providing jobs right now. Hundreds of people have lost their jobs in coal bankruptcies in the past few years. And there aren’t jobs being replaced by carbon capture yet. So the timelines are just off.
Douglas: What was your big takeaway at the end of the podcast?
McKim: Economic diversification can’t really be replaced by one industry. Whether or not you keep something going, it’s going to have to be larger than one industry. What I found is that there are other people who want to not just keep coal demand going, but diversify a little bit beyond that. And that’s not to say there aren’t efforts but the primary effort is to transform the city into a Silicon Valley for carbon products, whether that’s carbon dioxide or coal directly itself. And I think that’s going to be the primary effort and what I think I sort of found in the podcast is.
Douglas: What did you learn during the podcast that we haven’t touched on?
McKim: The podcast is actually very humorous. It follows a competition that involves an underdog doing carbon capture. We sort of build a friendship throughout the show. It talks about the grief of losing coal and coal plants. I lost my dad while reporting the story. And so I talked about that. There’s a lot of sentimentality and humor, and it tries to sort of get at this in a way that is not boring. So hopefully, it’s an interesting story. And I think there are a lot of parallels with West Virginia. So I hope that some of your audience might find it compelling.
The podcast Carbon Valley looks at carbon sequestration and alternative uses for carbon.
A bipartisan group in Congress, including several Ohio Valley lawmakers, is pushing for more federal support for poorly understood technology known as carbon capture and storage. The lawmakers and an uncommon alliance of labor, business, and environmental groups want to pass legislation called the FUTURE Act which would speed commercial deployment of technology that reduces carbon dioxide emissions from industries that burn fossil fuels.
Such technology has been in development for decades. Today, a number of commercial-scale projects exist demonstrating various technologies that “scrub” CO2 from the waste stream and store it underground are possible. However, scaling those projects up to levels that would affect the atmosphere in significant ways is still prohibitively expensive.
The new legislation is the latest in a long line of federal attempts to help scale up carbon capture, most of which have failed. But as CO2 reaches record levels in the atmosphere and scientific evidence mounts about the clear danger of climate change, even some who were skeptical about the technology are now willing to reconsider carbon capture and storage.
Change of Mind
Akshat Rathi is a Ph.D. chemical engineer-turned journalist based in London, where he writes for the business news outlet Quartz.
His interest and skepticism about carbon storage as a solution to global carbon emission woes set him on a year-long trip around the world to research the topic for a series of reports called “The Race to Zero Emissions.”
Credit Beimeng Fu
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Akshat Rathi (R) on a tour of Sinopec’s Shengli Dongying coal power plant. In the background, the plant’s carbon capture unit.
“I was highly skeptical,” he said. “The idea that you would be able to capture it and just bury it? As if people are going to bury the money underground? Because it would cost you to capture that carbon and the next day you’re simply going to bury it?”
After traveling to eight countries and talking to hundreds of people, Rathi said he has a new perspective.
“I have changed my mind,” he said. “This technology is actually feasible.”
He’s quick to point out that other developments will remain critically important, such as investment in renewable energy and efficiency, but he’s now convinced carbon capture will need to be in the mix.
“No serious body, no academic body, no scientists, no government officials would say that we will stop burning fossil fuels” in the coming decades, he said. While solar, wind and other clean energy developments are booming, Rathi said they still will fall short of demand. “The world requires so much energy, and the amount of energy we will consume will keep increasing as the population keeps growing till about 2050. And we will be burning fossil fuels.”
“Carbon capture is just one part, but a key part of the solution,” he said. “I’m hopeful that the system exists to take this and make this something that could save humanity from climate change.”
Collision Course
For decades researchers in the Ohio Valley and around the world have been focused on how to burn fossil fuels in more environmentally friendly ways. The pursuit of “clean coal” has yielded some innovations by improving power plant efficiency and reducing pollutants linked to smog and soot. But pulling CO2 from smokestacks is still a complex, expensive venture.
“The amount we capture today is about 40 million tons,” Akshat Rathi said. “Just to put that in perspective, we produce 40 BILLION tons. So we’re capturing .1 percent of all emissions that we put out in the air.”
That carbon dump, releasing CO2 that had been sequestered in the earth eons ago, puts us on a collision course with climate change. International goals set in the Paris Climate Agreement require dramatically reducing CO2 emissions globally to “net zero” by 2050.
“The ‘zero’ doesn’t mean we don’t burn fossil fuels at all,” Rathi said. “It means we burn fossil fuels with carbon capture, or there are technologies that can pull carbon dioxide from the air – negative emissions technologies.”
While the United States has announced intentions to pull out of the Paris Agreement – an act that will take many years to complete – the only other country in the world that wasn’t signed on, Syria, has now also committed to the agreement.
“Carbon dioxide is not a U.S.-only problem,” Rathi said, “it’s a global problem. So even if the U.S. doesn’t want to reduce emissions, other countries do.”
Regional Research
Many of the technologies for carbon capture have been in development since the 70s. The Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory in Morgantown, West Virginia, has been researching various aspects of carbon capture technology for decades.
About two dozen commercial scale projects are in operation around the world, including a project supported by NETL. A relatively small coal-fired power plant in Texas called Petra Nova has successfully captured and stored 90 percent of carbon emissions in its first year — about a million tons of CO2 — making it the largest “clean coal” facility in the world, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
“We’re spending tens of billions of dollars investing in this infrastructure of all these pipelines moving natural gas to natural gas generating plants which are 40 to 60 year assets. So we’re going to be burning gas for a long time,” he said, noting that gas still produces plenty of carbon emissions.
“The same principals of carbon sequestration for coal plants can apply and will need to apply to gas plants in order to achieve the significant reductions in greenhouses gas necessary to avoid increasing temperature globally.”
But the record for successfully deploying carbon capture is spotty, at best. What might have been the flagship U.S. project ended earlier this year when the Southern Company pulled the plug on a plan to turn coal into gas and then capture carbon emissions at its new facility in Kemper County, Mississippi. The plant will instead burn natural gas. The earlier FutureGen project, launched by the Bush administration, also fizzled before a promised low-emissions power plant was built.
Question of Will
Credit Carolyn
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On a tour of China Resources Power’s Haifeng coal power plant, in front of the desulfurization plant that extracts sulfur from the exhaust gas.
Rathi said running carbon capture technologies and the infrastructure to pump and store the CO2 requires a lot of energy.
“On a typical power plant right now you are spending about 10 to 20 percent of the energy that you produce to do the capturing,” he said. “That may seem a lot but that’s where our value system comes in place. Are we really interested in doing this?”
Rathi said it will take significant government incentives, like carbon taxes, around the globe to scale up implementation of carbon capture and storage. He estimates meeting goals the international community has set will require about $500 billion annually, or about 1 percent of global GDP.
That’s not cheap. But the estimated costs of unchecked climate change quickly climb far higher than that. The real question, Rathi said, is not one of cost, but one of values and of public and political will.
Akshat Rathi’s investigation into carbon-capture technology will published on Quartz in the coming weeks. You can sign up to be the first to know.
“Plugged In” is a series of conversations with energy experts who can offer insight into the changing energy landscape in the Ohio Valley region and beyond.
