What’s Killing Carbon Capture?

On a brittle, blustery afternoon on the outskirts of New Haven, W. Va., the faint odor of ammonia isn’t the only sour note in the air. New Haven, an Ohio River coal mining town of 1,550, is home to American Electric Power’s 1,300-megawatt Mountaineer Plant. The plant has a 1,103-foot-tall chimney and burns 12,000 tons of coal a day to generate electricity for AEP’s 11-state grid, which supplies power to 5.3 million customers. In the process, it annually belches out 8.5 million metric tons of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

Abutting the plant is an ambitious $100 million experiment: a seven-story, steel-and-fiberglass rectangle, corralled by dull metal catwalks and rattled by motors and pumps. The apparatus traps a portion of the plant’s carbon-dioxide-rich exhaust using an ammonia-based catalyst. (Hence the acrid smell.) The reclaimed CO₂ is pumped 8,000 feet underground, where, in theory, it will remain harmlessly out of the atmosphere. The goal of the experiment is to prove that carbon capture and storage technology, or CCS, works, and in so doing, provide one possible solution to global warming.