NRG Energy advised ERCOT on Monday that it plans to mothball its Petra Nova Power plant, centerpiece of the world’s largest carbon-capture facility.
NRG issued a notification indicating that the plant will shut down on Dec. 20 but will be available for annual seasonal operations between June 1 and Sept. 30. ERCOT market participants have until Oct. 12 to file comments on any possible reliability effects from the suspension.
Operations at the plant have been suspended since May 1. NRG cited the global economic downturn and the low price of oil.
The plant, which has a summer capacity of 71 MW, was retrofitted at a cost of $1 billion to capture carbon from one of the nearby W.A. Parish Generating Station’s coal-fired units. Post-combustion carbon-capture technology reduces Petra Nova’s carbon emissions by 90%. The captured carbon is funneled through an 80-mile pipeline to a nearby oil field.
Petra Nova became operational in December 2016, on budget and on schedule. NRG said the plant delivered more than 1 billion tons of captured CO2 within its first 10 months. Power Engineering honored the project in 2017 as its Coal-Fired Project of the Year. Industry analysts don’t expect the plant to return to operation until oil prices stay consistently above $50 or $60/barrel.
Despite the project’s carbon-capture pedigree, NRG has remained a target of environmentalists. Chrissy Mann, the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign representative, said that even when the Petra Nova project was operational, the Parish facility was the No. 1 source of particulate matter and No. 2 source of sulfur dioxide in the state of Texas.
“As NRG seemingly ends its carbon-capture project, NRG needs to take steps to address its dangerous air and water pollution,” Mann said. “It definitely makes economic sense that NRG is moving away from this continued investment in coal.”
