15 September 2009-- The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) awarded $70.5 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to Arizona Public Service (APS) to expand a reuse carbon mitigation project at a coal-fired power plant.
APS's algae-based carbon mitigation project will be expanded to include testing with a coal-based gasification system. The process aims to minimize production of carbon dioxide when gasifying coal. The company will expand a concept for co-production of electricity and substitute natural gas by coal gasification, while scaling up a technology where CO2 emissions are biologically captured by algae and processed into liquid transportation fuels. APS will focus on the engineering aspects of continuous cultivation, harvesting, and processing of algae grown from power plant emissions. The host facility for this project is the Cholla Power Plant in Arizona.
Funding for the expansion falls under the ARRA's $1.52 billion solicitation for carbon capture and storage from industrial sources. The APS project is one of two existing CCS projects in the industrial carbon capture program administered by DOE's Office of Fossil Energy. The other is a Ramgen Power Systems project to scale-up a device that uses supersonic shockwaves to compress CO2 for capture and storage."
They are, in another facility, in the second project mentioned, developing more efficient industrial technology for the actual capture of CO2, i.e., "supersonic shockwaves to compress CO2". Instead of "capture and storage", however, such improved recovery technology could, conceivably, support more efficient algae cultivation, or provide more concentrated CO2 to a Sabatier or Carnol processor for the direct production of hydrocarbon fuels.
In any case, the issues of punitive Cap&Trade and the oil industry's running dog Sequestration are beginning to seem more and more like irrelevant, coal industry-crippling wastes of time and money; and irresponsible squanderings of a potentially-valuable raw material resource.