Dominion fails to secure stimulus funding for putative carbon-capture facility

ST. PAUL, Va. – Dominion Virginia Power hasn’t yet decided if it will build a carbon capture and storage project at its new plant, despite failing to secure federal economic stimulus money for the effort.

The proposal would put a $580 million carbon capture facility at the new Virginia City Hybrid Energy Center, a 585-megawatt coal-fired power plant scheduled to go online in 2012. The hope was for half of that cost to come from stimulus funding.

Dominion estimates that the facility would remove and store underground 545,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year from the power plant emissions. The project is one of many around the nation designed to reduce emissions of the gas, which is essential to plant life but is believed to cause global warming.

The federal government has deemed carbon dioxide a pollutant, and regulation is expected in the foreseeable future.

“Dominion remains committed to installing carbon capture and storage equipment at Virginia City when it becomes commercially available,” said Greg Edwards, a spokesman for Dominion at the power plant. “The site is designed to be carbon capture compatible, and it’s still a suitable location for a CCS project.”

Despite the failure to secure funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, Edwards said, the company’s work with Virginia Tech on the storage of carbon dioxide in unminable coal seams has been valuable and will continue – and Dominion will be “looking at future opportunities to take advantage of that work.”

If another funding opportunity were to arise, Edwards said, “I’m sure that would be welcome.”

Meanwhile, American Electric Power, the company that provides most of Southwest Virginia’s electricity through subsidiary Appalachian Power, received a $334 million infusion of economic stimulus funding from the federal energy department, after a carbon capture and storage project began operating in October at its Mountaineer plant in New Haven, W.Va.

A few days after the Dec. 4 announcement of the funding for the Mountaineer plant project, Chief Executive Officer Michael Morris told the Wall Street Journal that the technology could allow his company, the nation’s biggest carbon dioxide emitter, to eliminate its coal-fired power plant emissions by 2025.

According to the Journal, Morris believes AEP could install carbon capture equipment on three-fourths of its coal-fired plants and retire the rest from operation, covering the cost of carbon capture and storage by roughly doubling the price of electricity from coal-fired plants – meaning they’d still be cheaper than nuclear.

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