Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America Inc (MHIA) on September 23 announced that, in collaboration with Southern Company, it has begun a program to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) from Georgia Power Plant Yates, located near Newnan, Ga.
The pilot-scale project at Yates, which uses a mobile version of the KM-CDR CO2 capture process developed by Kansai Electric and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries of Japan (MHI), will provide additional process information before the technology is demonstrated next year at a much larger scale, 500 tons per day (TPD) of CO2, at Alabama Power's Plant Barry.
The pilot project at Yates is a 'catch and release' process, where a small amount of CO2 is captured, using MHI's proprietary KS-1 solvent that absorbs CO2, and then returned to the plant's flue gas stack. For the project at Plant Barry, the 500 TPD of CO2 will be compressed and transported via pipeline to deep underground storage formations.
Atlanta-based Southern Company, the parent of Georgia Power and Alabama Power, and MHI have been working over the past month on the research project at Yates, which is expected to continue through the middle of November.
"This program is part of MHIA's phased approach to capturing CO2 from a coal-fired power plant and is an important step forward in our efforts to develop a cost-effective and efficient process to reduce CO2 emissions," said Yoshio Nakayama, vice president and general manager of MHIA Environmental Systems Division. "Our goal with this research is to move our CO2 capture technology closer to commercial deployment."
The Barry test represents one of the industry's largest demonstrations of a start-to-finish coal-fired power plant carbon capture and storage system.
