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Friday, October 24, 2008
Powerspan begins its carbon cap demonstration
By Jim Kozubek, Special to Mass High Tech
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Powerspan Corp. next month will begin the first field demonstrations of its ECO2 technology, a system that attaches to coal-fired power plant stacks and traps carbon dioxide. The Portsmouth, N.H.-based company will install a one megawatt pilot-scale unit designed to trap 20 tons of CO2 a day at the R.E. Burger Plant in Ohio, operated by FirstEnergy Corp.
Powerspan also is conducting engineering studies prior to the sale and installation of $200 million worth of ECO2 commercial scale demonstrations at Antelope Valley Station in North Dakota under Basin Electric Power Cooperative and the WA Parish plant in Texas under NRG Energy Inc.
Those demonstration systems would be operational in 2012 and able to trap a million tons of CO2 a year, and will be used by Powerspan to try to sell the ECO2 to larger, 500-megawatt sized plants that yield 5 million tons of CO2 a year.
Tom Feeley, a technology manager at the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, said a handful of companies, including Alstom Corp. of France, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America Inc. of New York, and Babcock and Wilcox Co. of Virginia are developing CO2 capture technologies, but none has “been commercially demonstrated at a 500 megawatt power plant and been shown to perform up to specs.”
Policy could be on Powerspan’s side. Carbon dioxide emissions from power plants are “unregulated at the federal level, but there is a growing consensus (that) standards limiting CO2 emissions will be promulgated within the five years,” said Powerspan spokesperson Stephanie Procopis.
Powerspan added 30 jobs this year and now has 85 employees.
“We do anticipate (federal policies) will call for major reductions and necessitate the installation of CO2 capture technologies,” Powerspan CEO and cofounder Frank Alix said.
Force is already being applied at a regional level. The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, adopted by 10 Northeastern states in 2005, seeks to reduce power sector CO2 emissions by 10 percent by 2018.
Founded as Zero Emissions Technology Inc. in 1996 and renamed in 2004, Powerspan has its core technology, the ECO or Electro-Catalytic Oxidation unit, which currently is removing nitrogen and sulfur oxides, mercury and particulates at one of R.E. Burger’s two 156 megawatt coal-fired boiler stacks.
Powerspan also has competitors in nitrogen, sulfur, mercury and particulate capturing, including Fuel Tech Inc. of Illinois, which has sold 450 units of nitrogen oxide scrubbers on power plants as large as 600 megawatts.
The company to date has raised $60 million through angels, venture capitalists and private equity firms, including The Beacon Group of New Jersey, FirstEnergy, NGEN Partners LLC of New York, Calvert Group Ltd. of Maryland, Rockport Capital Partners of Boston, Fluor Corp. of Texas, Angeleno Group LLC of California.
Alexander Ellis, partner at Rockport Capital, said that Powerspan is the only pollutant-capturing technology company in which his firm has invested.
“We’ve looked at pretty much most of the startups out there. One of the problems, frankly, is that a lot of these entrepreneurs have no idea what they are up against in terms of power company adoption,” he said.
ECO2 captures CO2 with an ammonia-based solvent that absorbs it at a low temperature. The solvent is heated to release the CO2 in a contained system to be compressed and dried for storage.
Powerspan is not the only New England company looking to deal with power plant CO2 emissions. GreenFuel Technologies Corp. of Cambridge, uses algae to consume CO2, and in May secured $13.9 million to seek solutions at a commercial scale.
Jim Kozubek is a freelance writer in Portsmouth, N.H.
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