The Star-Ledger (Newark, N.J.)  [Printer-friendly version]
April 26, 2009

PROPOSED FACILITY IN LINDEN WOULD CAPTURE CO2

PurGen, a $5B plant, would pipe the gas beneath the ocean floor

By Brian T. Murray, Star-Ledger Staff

Some scientists call it a hope for reducing the industrial greenhouse
gases blamed for global warming; skeptics say it is the new frontier
of dumping.

"Carbon capture and sequestration" is an emerging -- critics say
unproven -- technology that takes carbon dioxide or CO2 that normally
would spew from industrial smokestacks and pumps it deep into the
earth. Once there, it is, ostensibly, trapped forever.

Unless something goes wrong.

The dialogue over the carbon sequestration worst-case scenario has
come out of the laboratory and into New Jersey's backyard with a plan
to link the technology for the first time to a large, commercial
electric plant proposed in Linden.

Last month, Linden planners received designs for a $5 billion project
called "PurGen." It is a 500 megawatt, coal-fueled facility using a
100-mile, underground pipeline to push as much as 10 million tons of
CO2 annually -- emissions from the new plant and eventually
neighboring industrial operations -- to a point 70 miles off the coast
and about 2,200 yards beneath the Atlantic Ocean.

The proposal took on greater significance last week, when the
Environmental Protection Agency declared CO2 and other greenhouse
gases a public health danger -- triggering a regulatory process that
may drastically restrict emissions from existing and new power and
industrial plants.

Critics question the viability of piping CO2 under the ocean floor in
a heavily traveled area and say the state should instead pursue
windmill and solar technology. Proponents argue the plant will provide
a reliable source of energy without spewing pollutants into the air.

"With New Jersey importing about a third of its electrical energy, the
500 megawatts coming from this plant will reduce the state's reliance
on power that comes predominantly from uncontrolled dirty coal plants
out of state... while also addressing New Jersey's environmental
challenges," said Bradley Campbell, the lawyer spearheading the
project.

A former commissioner of the state Department of Environmental
Protection now in private practice, Campbell was hired to steer SCS
Engineers of Massachusetts through the maze of local, state and
federal approvals needed for the project. The plant is slated for a
former DuPont chemical site along the Arthur Kill, with the pipeline
running under Raritan Bay to the ocean.

Frank Smith and Jim Croyle, two principals of SCS, said their
commercial energy plant will be the "first of its kind in the world"
to link carbon capture with another so-called "clean energy" process
known as coal gasification or Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle
technology.

"But if you look at each component to be included in the plant, they
are each well-established, standard and tried technologies.
Gasification has been around since the early 1930s, and sequestration
since the 1970s," Smith said.

The five coal plants already generating electricity in New Jersey burn
coal, creating a toxic by-product known as fly ash. PurGen's
gasification process heats coal with pressured oxygen and steam. Gas
is formed, and the process also allows PurGen to offset higher
operating costs by selling ammonia, hydrogen and other by-products,
Croyle said.

TALK ABOUT DEEP STORAGE

Oil companies already sequester CO2 deep underground at dozens of
locations around the world, although not to control greenhouse
emissions. They inject CO2 into oil reservoirs to force every last oil
drop to the surface.

One of the first commercial operations to sequester CO2 was in Norway.
Statoil of Norway, faced with a CO2 byproduct from its natural gas
operation, has been piping nearly a million tons of carbon emissions
annually into a sandstone aquifer about 1,100 yards beneath the North
Sea.

But some activist groups insist carbon sequestration has yet to be
used by a large coal-fueled energy plant, and the potential impacts
of storing large amounts under an ocean bed are still unknown.

"The sequestration of carbon dioxide in the ocean and its possible
impacts are not well understood, so this represents a large experiment
with a part of the environment that is already in bad shape
ecologically," said Tim Dillingham of the American Littoral Society, a
national group of scientists, naturalists and environmentalists based
in New Jersey.

"The ocean has quickly become the new dumping ground for energy -- for
siting industrial facilities and now industrial waste," he added.

"Why do they think the carbon will be held there for centuries?" asked
Jeff Tittel of the New Jersey Sierra Club. "No one knows. No one can
say for sure. This is a gamble. We'd be better off investing in wind,
solar and energy efficiency."

Researchers at Princeton, Harvard and Stanford universities, however,
advocate sequestration technology, with some testifying before public
agencies. The Natural Resources Defense Council and Clean Air Task
Force also is urging exploration of carbon capture.

WHAT COULD FUTURE HOLD?

The Union of Concerned Scientists, usually on the side of activists,
is cautious in its assessment.

"We're agnostic on its long-term contribution as an energy source
because we don't have any long-term demonstrations. We don't have many
carbon sequestration operations linked to coal facilities, and we
don't have anything on a large commercial scale," said Barbara Freese,
co-author of the UCS's 2008 report, "Coal Power in a Warming World."

The North Sea operation, she noted, involves a million tons of CO2
annually. The average coal plant generates 4 million tons annually,
and PurGen anticipates generating nearly 5 million tons a year from
its plant.

The UCS also contends sequestration must overcome potential challenges
of contaminating ground water, seismic events and leakage -- slow
leaks
that send CO2 back into the air and fast leaks that kill. Activists
such as Greenpeace often cite a 1986 natural release of CO2 from Lake
Nyos, a volcanic crater lake in Cameroon, that left about 1,700 people
dead from asphyxiation.

The U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory
concluded such catastrophic releases "are virtually nonexistent for
geologic sequestration," and geologists called it absurd to compare
operations such as those planned by PurGen to the natural disaster at
Lake Nyos.

"You have a mile of impermeable clay on top of the sandstone. The
really big earthquake in Sumatra caused a rupture that was about 10
meters. We're talking about sequestering the CO2 under at least 2,000
meters of clay. It's not possible to have an earthquake to fracture
that," said professor Daniel Schrag of the Harvard University
Laboratory for Geo-chemical Oceanography, who has reviewed the
project.

"I am as green as green gets. But I'm not like groups like Greenpeace,
which is saying we can take care of all our energy demands with wind
and solar," Schrag added.

Coal also remains the cheapest source of electrical energy in the
nation. The Department of Energy estimates the United States has
enough natural reserves to meet energy needs for another 250 years.

"Coal is like heroin -- cheap, plentiful and addictive, but very
dangerous and to get it they take down mountains along with square-
miles of trees, adding to the carbon output and environmental damage,"
said Tittel of the Sierra Club, arguing projects like PurGen continue
the nation's reliance on fossil fuels.

The proposal is too new to gauge local resistance, but initial
response appears to be concerns based on the mistaken notion that
PurGen would be a traditional, smokestack-belching coal plant, said
Linden Mayor Richard Gerbounka, adding, "It is our job to educate
local residents."

Approvals on the project may take months, but Gerbounka said an
information campaign starts tomorrow night with a meeting at Trembley
Point, the residential neighborhood closest to the PurGen site.

Trembley Point is more than a mile from the PurGen site and separated
by the New Jersey Turnpike, which bisects the city. The site itself is
brownfields redevelopment and surrounded by other heavy industry or
abandoned factories.

"I'm excited about the project. I think it will be beneficial to the
city of Linden, the state of New Jersey and the nation," Gerbounka
said. "It helps wean us off Middle East oil, and hopefully the
technology is there to do the project as they say it can be done."

Copyright (c) 2009 The Star-Ledger