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Fossil Energy - Carbon Engineering
Team goal
Reduce greenhouse gas in the atmosphere by effectively sequestering CO2 in underground geological formations.
Faculty
Team description
The backbone of America’s exceptional quality of life and technological development is energy, especially electric power. About 70 percent of our nation’s electricity is generated from fossil fuels. While fossil fuels such as coal provide an economical and reliable resource for generating electricity, they also produce carbon emissions that contribute to climate change and impacting the acidity of the ocean waters. Reducing carbon emissions dramatically is a desirable goal. However, renewable energy sources can only provide a small percentage of the carbon-emissions reductions needed. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) will be a crucial component in reducing atmospheric concentrations of CO2, especially in the short term, which will allow sufficient time for other carbon-reducing technologies to be developed and deployed.
Dr. Brian McPherson, a USTAR professor at the University of Utah, and internationally recognized expert in carbon sequestration, is developing approaches to inject CO2 into geologic formations in Utah and elsewhere. Dr. McPherson and his team from the Energy and Geoscience Institute at the University of Utah, have already conducted several successful tests of these critical CCS technologies. The basic idea is to take CO2 created by burning fossil fuels and pump it thousands of feet underground into unique geologic formations that store the CO2 permanently and prevent it from entering the atmosphere. Utah contains many of the most promising geologic formations for CCS.
Dr. McPherson created and leads the Southwest Regional Partnership for Carbon Sequestration, which was selected by the U.S. Department of Energy and its National Energy Technology Laboratory to evaluate available technologies to capture and store carbon emissions. Dr. McPherson was awarded a $67 million grant from the US Department of Energy to study carbon capture and storage. Adding in private and partner funding, the project will total $88 million.
CCS technology will be important to maintaining Utah’s position as a net exporter of energy. The ability to generate electricity using Utah's abundant coal and natural gas resources, while still meeting new regulations limiting CO2 emissions, will mean new jobs in mining and energy production in new and existing electric plants in rural Utah.
President Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress have expressed an intention to pass legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Proposed legislation would allow the trading of greenhouse-gas emission credits, creating a new carbon economy in the U.S. Supported by USTAR, the work of Dr. McPherson and his team would make Utah an important player in this new carbon economy. Carbon storage facilities built in rural Utah would create a number of related commercial opportunities, including the selling of excess carbon-emission credits generated by CCS activities in Utah. To take advantage of these opportunities, USTAR launched a new company joining Dr. McPherson and his team with Headwaters Incorporated, a large utah-based energy company, to form Headwaters Clean Carbon Services (HCCS). HCCS was recently awarded 2 million dollars by the Department of Energy to develop tools for assessing the risks associated with carbon sequestration.
On January 14 and 15, 2009, in local outreach meetings held in Green River, Price and Salt Lake City, Southern California Edison announced that it is working with Dr. McPherson, the Southwest Partnership and USTAR to pursue a unique opportunity to construct a next-generation coal-to-hydrogen power plant in southeast Utah using the newest technologies, including CCS, to provide affordable and reliable electricity with far less greenhouse gas emissions. According to projections, over 4.5 million tons of carbon dioxide a year produced from this new power plant would be captured and stored using CCS technology.
CCS technology can also be used to enhance oil output. For decades, CO2 has been injected into oil wells in Texas to enhance oil recovery. Essentially the CO2 "pushes" oil out of the ground that would otherwise be impossible to pump out. The same CO2 that assists oil recovery is trapped underground, where it can't contribute to climate change. A Department of Energy analysis estimates that Utah could recover 2.8 billion barrels of oil using CO2, enough to supply gasoline to Utah drivers, at current levels, for more than 80 years.
Related information :
Watch a July 2010 interview with Dr. McPherson on carbon sequestration and commercialization.
On March 23, 2009, KUER Radio broadcast an interview with Dr. McPherson and State Energy Advisor Dianne Nielson on the science and regulatory framework of carbon management. Listen to it here.
In July 2008 the Carbon Capture and Sequestration project continued to turn heads, this time capturing the interest of the BBC. The project was one of only a handful of technologies chosen by the BBC to be featured in a documentary focusing on climate change that ran in December 2009. You can learn more about it by clicking here. Or view it here.
Listen to a KCPW interview with Dr. McPherson (Feb. 2010).
Learn about the International Energy Agency conference of geological sequestration computer simulation experts held at the University of Utah in February 2010.