Co-op gets loan on carbon project

BISMARCK — The federal government is backing a $300 million loan for Basin Electric Power Cooperative to capture carbon dioxide at the company’s coal-fired power plant in central North Dakota.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer said it’s first commercial-scale carbon sequestration project at an existing coal-fired power plant.

The USDA says the carbon dioxide will be cleaned, pressurized and moved by pipeline to oil fields, then injected into oil-bearing formations below ground to help recover more oil.

Schafer, a former North Dakota governor, announced the loan Thursday for Basin’s Antelope Valley Station near Beulah.

Carbon dioxide emissions are widely blamed for global warming.

Basin, based in Bismarck, chose Powerspan Corporation of Portsmouth, N.H., last year to provide the technology to remove about 3,000 tons daily and some 1 million tons of C02 annually from one of two units at the Antelope Valley Station. The 900-megawatt plant generates a total of about 7.5 million tons of CO2 in a year.

Frank Alix, Powerspan’s chief executive officer, said the company’s patent-pending technology involves an ammonia-based solution that traps carbon dioxide from the flue gas of a power plant. The technology was tested late last year at a small demonstration project at the R.E. Burger power plant in Shadyside, Ohio, he said.

“We have results from that project that we think proves the process,” Alix said. “We aren’t at all nervous that it won’t work on a larger scale.”

The federal Energy Department has said technology already exists to capture the carbon dioxide given off by coal-fired power plants and inject it back to earth before it enters the atmosphere, but it’s too expensive.

Alix said his company’s CO2 capturing technology costs about 3 cents per kilowatt, or about half that of existing technology.

Basin has pitched the project as a model for other coal-fired power plants to copy.

“Obviously, there is a great desire, not only for the U.S. but for the rest of the world to capture and sequester CO2 in a cost-effective way,” Alix said. “We think this is a very big deal.”

The Antelope Valley Station is next to Basin’s Great Plains Synfuels plant, which has been capturing CO2 since 2000. The carbon dioxide is piped 205 miles to oil fields in southern Saskatchewan, where it’s sold to companies that pump it underground to force oil to the surface.

Basin spokesman Floyd Robb said CO2 from the Antelope Valley Station would be put in the pipeline, which will have spurs to North Dakota’s oil patch.

“We are working with several people in western North Dakota to develop a market for it,” Robb said.

Basin said the project could begin this year and be completed in 2012.

“It’s still at the pilot-project level,” Robb said “If it works and the technology proves out, we will be sequestering all of the emissions from the power plant.”

Basin generates about 1,950 megawatts of power for 2.5 million customers in nine Midwestern and Western states. The company operates two coal-fired power plants North Dakota and one in Wyoming, and is planning another in Wyoming and one in South Dakota.

Basin says about 90 percent of Basin’s power comes from coal. None of the company’s power plants at present is designed to capture

CO2 emissions.

Tags: basin electric, cooperative, carbon, loan