But the pressure to reduce carbon emissions grows every day. Sadly, no one expects $80 oil again anytime soon. Parish Plant will resume releasing 350,000 cars-worth of carbon dioxide every day. NRG says it will resume capturing carbon dioxide if oil prices rise again, but in the meantime, the W.G. carbon capture project yet, but only because it produced high-priced oil. While carbon capture and sequestration are well understood, the problem is it’s expensive, ranging between $40 and $232 a ton depending on the process, according to a European Union analysis. The world’s largest oil and gas companies are promising to capture as much carbon as they produce in hopes that carbon neutrality will allow them to keep producing. Oil and gas companies have been planning to use enhanced oil recovery to finance large-scale carbon capture projects, just as NRG did, to argue they are part of the climate change solution. Occidental Petraleum and others already pump CO2 out of the ground in Colorado and then down into Permian Basin wells. Dozens of fossil fuel companies tout carbon capture as their way forward as governments crackdown on emissions, which is why Petra Nova’s shutdown is so ominous. Chevron is running an ad campaign bragging about investing $1 billion to trap CO2. Talk of carbon capture, though, has become decidedly mainstream. NRG CEO Mauricio Gutierrez refocused the company away from owning generation and more toward retailing electricity to consumers. Meantime, NRG’s board forced Crane out because Wall Street does not like energy companies that dabble in both renewables and fossil fuels. Natural gas sells for less than $2 per million British Thermal Units, and new wind and solar projects produce cheaper electricity than new coal-fired plants. coal production and consumption dropped in 2019 to its lowest levels since 1978, according to the Energy Information Administration. Burning coal was the cheapest way to generate electricity, natural gas cost twice as much as it does today and carbon capture was a fringe idea hyped by executives like David Crane, who as CEO of NRG was trying to build a climate-friendly company.
I wrote my first column on Petra Nova almost exactly six years ago, when I was a rookie columnist.
Capturing and sequestering the gas for $40 oil makes no economic sense. The project only worked by selling the recovered oil for $80 a barrel or more. At the time, I declared the project “the kind of innovation that reduces greenhouse gases without significant harm to our economy and at no risk to the electricity consumer.”ĭisappointingly, NRG has shutdown Petra Nova. I picked up the coaster at the 2014 groundbreaking of NRG Energy’s $ 1 billion Petra Nova carbon capture project. The graphic shows exhaust leaving a coal-fired power plant, running through a tower that extracts the carbon dioxide and then pushes it through a pipeline to an oilfield, where workers pump the greenhouse gas underground to force up oil and sequester the CO2. Every morning, when I sit down behind my computer, I set my coffee cup on a coaster that reads: “A visionary CO2ncept for a Cleaner Tomorrow.”
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