XPRIZE Awards $5 Million for CO2 Capture Tests at Wyoming Powerplant
Awardees seek to use captured CO2 gas to produce:
methanol
concrete additives
foam-based plastics for insulation and building materials
Test site host utility delivers electricity to 122 local consumer-owned electric utilities:
3 million electric consumers
parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Montana, and New Mexico.
540,000 square miles of utility service area from the Canadian to the Mexican borders.
Dry Fork Powerplant struck by tornado June 1, 2018.
Dry Fork Generating Station - Gillette, Wyoming. Photo courtesy of Basin Electric Power Cooperative
Five winners of nonprofit XPRIZE Foundation's April 9, 2018 NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE $5 million award will use Wyoming's Dry Fork Generation Station Integrated Test Center (ITC) to demonstrate scaled-up versions of their carbon dioxide gas capture and conversion technologies.
Each team will test the commercial viability for combining carbon-dioxide gas capture from powerplant exhaust with other materials to create useful commercial materials. The products include methanol, concrete additives, and foam insulation for building construction. Teams are from India, China, Scotland, Canada, and University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA).
XPRIZE Foundation is headquartered in Culver City, California.
First publication by National Rural Electric Cooperative (NRECA) - Washington, DC. Written by Derrill Holly, staff writer for NRECA. Edits, photo captions, and additional info by Linecurrents.
Westminster, Colorado-based Tri-State G&T began developing the concept for a carbon inducement prize and test center eight years ago and has contributed $5 million to the ITC project. The Wyoming state legislature approved $15 million for ITC construction. The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, Washington DC, contributed $1 million.
Bismarck, North Dakota-based Basin Electric is majority owner and operator of Dry Fork Generating Station at Gillette, WY. Wyoming Municipal Power Agency is co-owner.
Basin Electric Power Cooperative service area - basinelectric.com
Basin Electric (Bismark, ND) generates electricity for local distribution cooperatives in nine West, Midwest and Plains U.S states. Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association (Westminster, CO) purchases wholesale power from Basin for re-sale to Tri-State's western Nebraska distribution co-ops.
The map shows individual local distribution co-op boundaries. Larger color-coded areas are generation & transmission associations (G&T's) owned by local co-ops.
Emissions from up to 20 MW of energy production will be diverted to a ported vent system feeding five small test bays and one larger working facility at the ITC. Researchers will be able to draw CO2 from that waste stream for industrial-scale production use.The five ITC teams will occupy five test bays used by the Carbon XPRIZE finalists, and will share access to flue gas produced by 1.5 MW of generation capacity.
After 10 months of production, XPRIZE judges will consider factors including operational costs, total production and net reduction of CO2 waste as factors in awarding $20 million in final prize money. Winners from the two test sites will split the proceeds.
The separate large test center can use up to 18.5 MW of flue gas flow. Kawasaki Heavy Industries, working with the Japan Coal Energy Center on a solid sorbent-based carbon capture technology, is the first tenant for the larger space at the ITC. Up to $9 million will be spent on the Kawasaki project, which will use sorbent as a low-cost carrier to absorb CO2 for later use as manufacturing feedstocks.
Facilities related to the ITC project now occupy 226,000 square feet of space at the Dry Fork site.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, coal-based electricity generation in the United States produced more than 1.2 million metric tons of CO2 in 2016. That number accounts for 68 percent of the total CO2 emissions from the energy sector.
Forty-one percent of the power used by electric cooperative members in the United States is produced through coal-based generation. Co-ops also rely heavily upon natural gas to operate peaking plants, run primarily during periods of high demand.
-- Note: Ten teams competed for $5 million in XPRIZE awards: five demonstration projects at the Wyoming ITC, and five at Canada's Shepard Energy Centre in Calgary, Alberta where the Alberta Carbon Conversion Technology Centre is fueled by natural gas.
Alberta will conduct production scale testing on plastics, concrete alternatives, new building compounds and nanoparticles for use in bioplastics and other products. --