Major carbon capture project to finish construction

The partners will be hosting a tour, ceremony and ribbon cutting to mark the milestone that day, after which they’ll start testing their system.

“It is exciting to see KHI’s progress on completing the construction of their test facility and we look forward to supporting their long-term performance testing,” Holly Krutka, director of the University of Wyoming School of Energy Resources, which manages the ITC, said in an emailed statement. “It’s also exciting to see the large-scale pilot being built by [Membrane Technology and Research], which is also underway.”

Kawasaki Heavy Industries’ project is a solid sorbent carbon capture system which uses physical or chemical absorption to capture carbon dioxide. It aims to show that this technology is viable for commercial deployment to large-scale power plants.

The demonstration is one of two major carbon capture projects in Wyoming that broke ground at the ITC in May. The other, headed by California-based gas separation developer Membrane Technology and Research, is still under construction.

Both projects will use flue gas from Gillette’s Dry Fork Station to test their approaches to capturing carbon dioxide.

Many Wyoming leaders have touted carbon capture as a key technology that could save the state’s struggling coal industry as it competes with lower-emitting and increasingly affordable alternatives on the electricity market. But the technology isn’t yet available on a wide scale because of its costs — a challenge that the projects aim to overcome.

Gov. Mark Gordon has made the commercialization of carbon capture technology a major focus of his administration.

Recently, the governor and other state and federal officials gathered at Gillette Community College for a conference about the future of the technology. The conference, organized by the Western Governors’ Association, which Gordon chairs, is taking a look at decarbonization strategies as part of Gordon’s “Decarbonizing the West” initiative.

“There really is no challenge I can see that it is more important for us to progress responsibly, thoughtfully and most importantly, honestly, than climate change, and that is what this initiative is about,” Gordon said.

The initiative won’t solely focus on carbon capture, Gordon told the Star-Tribune. It will also look at what can be done to reduce carbon in agriculture and through forestry management, to name a couple of examples.

“That’s why Wyoming is such an all-of-the-above approach. All of these things will have a benefit in reducing carbon dioxide,” Gordon said.

The conference was the first “workshop” in a series that will continue over the course of the next year. These workshops will look at how decarbonization strategies could put western states “at the forefront of innovation” and “reduce the effects of carbon emissions on the environment.”

The Western Governors’ Association aims to release a report about its findings next summer.

“The point I kind of wanted to make is that there are a suite of things that we can do to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A piece of it has got to be carbon capture,” Gordon told the Star-Tribune. “There’s a beachhead that Wyoming has really established in that area, which is why we started with this first workshop here.”

Wyoming’s under a lot of pressure to make carbon capture work on a large scale — and fast — amid increased restrictions on emissions and consumers’ demands for lower-emission sources of energy.

People in Wyoming will bear some of the cost of a transition, whether it emphasizes carbon capture or renewable energy. Wyomingites have already seen glimpses of those costs.

Earlier this year, the Wyoming Public Service Commission approved a carbon capture compliance surcharge for Rocky Mountain Power customers in Wyoming, WyoFile reported. That surcharge will cost Wyoming utility ratepayers an estimated $2 million total this year, according to WyoFile.

The surcharge stems from a 2020 bill that requires coal-fired plants to be retrofitted with carbon capture, utilization and sequestration technology in an attempt to prevent them from retiring early.

Not pursuing carbon capture would also have costs. Without the technology, Wyoming’s coal industry will likely continue to dwindle as the nation shifts to alternative energy sources, costing jobs.

“If indeed there is a common aggressive stance that consumers across the nation want to make toward transitioning to a different energy source, those costs ought to be socialized across the grid,” Gordon told the Star-Tribune. “Currently, they aren’t being socialized. They’re really imposing those on our industries here. If we’re going to prematurely shut down plants in Wyoming, those jobs are lost, those are components of our economy lost.”

There isn’t a clear path at this point toward socializing those costs.

“I’m trying to think about how we’d do that,” Gordon said.

Kawasaki Heavy Industries and Japan Carbon Frontier Organization will host the ceremony marking completion of construction of their carbon capture project on Oct. 9 at 3 p.m. Before the ceremony, there will be a tour of the Kawasaki Heavy Industries facility at 2 p.m.