POWER October 2010 - 84

FUELS
1. Expected U.S. coal power projects. This map shows 340 projects scheduled to kick off at coal-fired power plants in 2011, categorized by
whether a project is a major maintenance project or a capital project in either the planning or engineering phase. Source: Industrial Info Resources
United States market regions
Great Lakes
Northeast
New England
Southwest
Southeast
Mid-Atlantic
Coal-fired power plants with spending activity:
Coal-fired power plants with major maintenance project(s)
Coal-fired power plants with capital project(s) in engineering stage
Coal-fired power plants with capital project(s) in planning stage
West Coast
Rocky Mountains
Midwest
No reproduction allowed. All rights
reserved by Industrial Info Resources Inc.
er build-out a decade ago want to see another
glut of plants built and operating economics
destroyed if gas again soars from $4 to $15/
mmBtu. And despite the popular green luster
of wind power and solar power, few expect
those sources to generate more than a few
percentage points of the nation's electricity
over the next decade.
Plenty of Coal Projects
Although no new coal-fired plants may break
ground this year, Figure 1 shows a total of
340 upgrade and improvement projects at
coal-fired power plants, valued at over $23
billion, which are scheduled to begin construction
in 2011. That sum includes $16 billion
in new " clean coal " projects, $5 billion
in environmental retrofits (including carbon
capture and sequestration [CCS]), over $1.5
billion in major maintenance work, and nearly
$1 billion in efficiency upgrades.
Storing Carbon
During 2010 coal power developers and utilities
keenly tracked the progress of various
84
post-combustion projects designed to capture
and store power plant CO2
emissions,
as finding a cost-effective CCS process is at
the heart of keeping coal alive as a source
of electricity.
AEP's Mountaineer project, which became
operational in late 2009, was the nation's
first integrated CO2
capture and sequestration
project at a coal-fired power plant. That
project, located in New Haven, W.V., is using
Alstom's chilled ammonia process to capture
the CO2
stom's Chilled Ammonia CO2
cess Advances Toward Commercialization, "
February 2008). The Mountaineer CCS project
is receiving about $334 million in Department
of Energy (DOE) funding.
Early this year, NRG's Parish Generating
Station in Houston received notice of a DOE
award of up to $154 million to demonstrate
capturing CO2
emissions using Fluor's Econamine
FG Plus as a reagent (see " Commercially
Available CO2
Capture Technology, "
August 2009). Carbon dioxide captured on
that project will be used in enhanced oil rewww.powermag.com
from
a flue gas slip stream (see " Al-Capture
Procovery
projects. NRG expects its CCS project
to begin operating in 2013.
Pre-combustion technologies to lower
CO2 emissions got a huge boost in August
when the DOE announced it was restarting
its long-stalled FutureGen project, but the
new version, dubbed " FutureGen 2.0, " went
in a completely new direction: repowering
Ameren Corp.'s shuttered 200-MW Meredosia
Unit 4 with advanced oxy-combustion
technology. The project also includes construction
of a 175-mile pipeline that will
transport CO2
from the plant for injection underground.
The prior iteration of FutureGen
called for construction of a greenfield integrated
gasification combined-cycle power
plant in Mattoon, Ill., coupled with a CCS
system. ■
- Britt Burt (bburt@industrialinfo
.com) is vice president of research, and
Shane Mullins (smullins@industrialinfo
.com) is vice president of product development
for the power industry at Industrial
Info Resources (www.industrialinfo
.com) in Sugar Land, Texas.
POWER | October 2010

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POWER October 2010

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