We Energies, Alstom and The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) have said that a pilot project testing a chilled ammonia process has demonstrated more than 90% capture of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the flue stream of at a coal-fueled power plant in Wisconsin.

The companies started testing Alstom’s chilled ammonia process using a 1.7MW (electric) slipstream at We Energies’ Pleasant Prairie plant in early 2008. The test will conclude later this year.

The project demonstrated the viability of the carbon capture technology in real-world conditions such as changes in temperature and humidity, the inevitable starts and stops of a large power plant, and the environmental hurdles that go along with using any chemical process, said the companies.

Gale Klappa, chairman, president and CEO of We Energies, said: “One of the biggest challenges facing our industry is the development of cost effective technology that will allow us to capture carbon from the operation of power plants around the world.

“Today, with the success we’re reporting from the research here at Pleasant Prairie, the solution is one step closer to reality.”

The companies said that lessons learned at Pleasant Prairie already have provided information for efforts to scale up carbon capture and storage technologies for new power plants and for retrofit to existing plants.

A scaled-up 20MW (electric) capture system has been installed at AEP’s 1,300MW Mountaineer Plant, where it will remove an estimated 90% of carbon dioxide emissions from the flue gas stream it processes, capturing up to 100,000 metric tons of CO2 per year.

The captured CO2 will be compressed, pipelined, and injected into two different saline reservoirs located approximately 8,000 feet beneath the plant site. Battelle Memorial Institute will serve as the consultant for AEP on geological storage as a monitoring system will be used to track the extent of the sequestered CO2 over time.

Alstom is pursuing 10 demonstration projects in six different countries, including the We Energies project and partnership at Mountaineer with AEP. The Mountaineer project is one of two current or planned post-combustion carbon capture and storage (CCS) demonstrations for which EPRI has formed an industry collaborative to support management of testing and evaluations.

The EPRI collaborative will support the integration process/design of CO2 capture technologies and the monitoring and verification of CO2 storage, and it will assess the impacts of CO2 controls and storage on post-combustion coal-fueled generation. The data collected and analyzed by the collaborative will support efforts to advance CCS technologies to commercial scale and provide information to the public and industry on future electricity generation options.

Hank Courtright, senior vice president of EPRI, said: “We Energies, Alstom, EPRI and 37 other companies worked together to successfully advance carbon capture technology to the next step in its development.

“EPRI’s analyses show carbon capture and storage will be essential to achieve meaningful CO2 emissions reductions, and do it in a cost-effective way while meeting demand growth. Projects like this one, where a company steps up to lead a project and several more form a collaborative support it, are critical to advancing the technologies that we need to reduce the industry’s carbon footprint.”