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July 09, 2023
By Dan Gearino - Inside Climate News
Carbon capture faces a test with
North Dakota's Project Tundra
So far, attempts to build carbon capture plants have
been expensive and haven’t worked as advertised. Will Project Tundra
be different?
A North Dakota coal plant is being retrofit for
carbon capture. It will be a massive test
![](images/images_07_14_2023/pic3.jpg)
[Photo: Minnkota Power]
Energy companies have talked for years about how
carbon capture technology will preserve their ability to burn coal and
natural gas in a world that needs to drastically cut carbon emissions.
Last week, we learned some more about a project that may be an
important test case. Minnkota Power, a rural electric cooperative in
North Dakota, announced the next steps for Project Tundra, an attempt
to retrofit a 53-year-old coal-fired power plant so that its emissions
are captured before they enter the atmosphere, and then buried
underground.
So far, attempts to build power plants using this technology, often
known by the acronyms CCS or CCUS, have cost billions of dollars and
usually failed to work as advertised, as my colleague Nicholas Kusnetz
has reported. Despite this track record, the Inflation Reduction Act
includes an increase in carbon capture funding, inserted into the bill
at the insistence of Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, of West Virginia.
To better understand this announcement, I spoke with Emily Grubert, an
energy-systems expert and a professor at the University of Notre Dame.
She has deep knowledge of this subject, including from the year,
ending last summer, she spent helping to lead the Department of
Energy’s Office of Carbon Management.
My main takeaway from our interview was that carbon capture makes
sense in hard-to-decarbonize sectors like heavy industry, but it makes
little sense as retrofitting for old power plants. One of the reasons
is that carbon capture is an electricity-intensive process, so a plant
operator is going to need a large supply of electricity to run the
system, which adds to the overall costs, and means that the plant will
cost more to operate than widely available alternatives in the market.
Before I get to our conversation, here is some of what the people
behind the project are saying:
“By working together, we aim to advance carbon capture technology in a
way that can serve as a blueprint for our state, nation, and world to
meet ambitious decarbonization goals,” says Mac McLennan, Minnkota’s
president and CEO, in a statement. His company serves customers in
Minnesota and North Dakota.
Minnkota has been studying this project for years and has previously
estimated a cost of $1.4 billion for the retrofit. The project is to
take place at Milton R. Young Power Plant, which has summer capacity
of 684 megawatts and burns lignite, a soft, moist kind of coal that is
plentiful in that part of North Dakota.
The main point of this latest announcement was to confirm that the
project is in development and that Minnkota had a slate of partners to
make it happen, including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, or MHI, a
company that will be designing the carbon capture system. The partners
say they will decide by early next year whether to continue into the
construction phase.
“Project Tundra represents an important step in the scale-up of carbon
capture technology, which will play an important role in realizing a
carbon neutral society,” says Takajiro Ishikawa, president and CEO of
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America, in a statement.
Here is my discussion with Grubert, edited for length and clarity.
When you see an announcement like this, what do you think?
I see all the press releases saying we’re really looking forward to
this plant continuing to operate for decades to come, when I think
it’s at the end of its life right now. The alternative to CCS would
essentially be to shut the plant down, so this is not a situation
where you are eliminating emissions from a plant that would have
continued to operate anyway. Probably most coal plants only make it to
50-ish years before they need a major overhaul. So, this is
essentially a rebuild of the plant.
When you look at the additional power needed to run a CCS system,
and you just look at the math here, it becomes difficult to justify
compared to all of the alternatives that are available in North Dakota
and in the Midwest, right?
You’re exactly right. The reason that a lot of states that are coal
producers are excited about CCS is because it increases the amount of
coal you need to produce. And I think that the point that I would like
to make to people is basically this is inherently more expensive
[compared to a plant without CCS].
Do you have an idea of what the back-of-the-envelope math is? Like,
how might the cost of a megawatt-hour from this plant compare to the
cost from this plant after a CCS retrofit?
I haven’t done this math in awhile and I haven’t done it on North
Dakota lignite in awhile. I think they’re using an MHI process at
Tundra; I’m not exactly sure what the efficiencies are, but ballpark,
[the cost difference would be] maybe 50% to 100% more, so maybe up to
doubling it. [Editor’s note: Inside Climate News asked Minnkota Power
for an estimate on the cost of electricity from the plant. A spokesman
said that federal tax credits, including a credit that pays $85 per
ton of carbon that is captured, “will cover both the capital and
operating costs of the facility” and allow the plant to sell
electricity at a competitive price.]
If you were talking to people in North Dakota, and you were laying
out the numbers, basically saying that we’re going to spend hundreds
of millions of dollars in federal money to produce electricity that
potentially will cost twice as much, I wonder if the constituents
would want that.
I’m not sure how much people are thinking about this as a big cost,
rather than as kind of an interesting experiment that allows an
industry to stay around. I think that is part of why this is such a
hard conversation. In the case of Tundra specifically, my
understanding is that a lot of that power is committed to be sold out
of state to co-ops in Minnesota and such. And so, it’s unclear who
gets hit by the additional costs, particularly when you tie in
potentially a big federal grant.
We’ve seen carbon capture projects attempted, in a bunch of places.
Five years from now, what happens with this project, do you think?
I think it’s not online within five years. I think, in general, what
we’ve seen with big CCS projects is that they tend to be over budget
and behind schedule.
In this particular case, because you’re working on 50-year-old units,
you also have to go in and fix them before you can do those retrofits.
I think you’re probably going to find things that are wrong with the
plant that you didn’t expect that you have to fix before you can go in
with these really big retrofits. That’s a reason a lot of the time
that these projects tend to be over budget or behind schedule.
One of the things that people maybe don’t think about a lot with CCS,
with a developing technology, is that at least on the power-plant
side, specifically on the coal-fired power-plant side, these are
essentially all retrofits, which means that the kinds of learning that
you might expect is actually a lot less than if you were building a
whole bunch of identical plants. Every plant is different. And so
you’re going to have to go deal with that.
One useful thing when looking at project announcements like this, I
think, is to imagine if everything goes right, what that looks like.
And when I look at something like this and imagine everything going
right, it seems like the result has some serious shortcomings even
then.
Yeah, the result is you spend hundreds of millions of dollars of
taxpayer money in addition to a whole bunch of ratepayer money.
The best case scenario is you capture 90% of the carbon emissions that
are coming off of a plant that probably would have otherwise shut
down. So that’s still additional carbon, depending on what you think
that the plant would have been replaced with.
I feel like it’s important when talking about the shortcomings of
carbon capture retrofits to specify that the idea of carbon capture is
an important one, right?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
So walk me through that.
Most of the funding focus, and most of the project focus, I would
argue, has been in the power sector. But there’s a bunch of other
stuff where we don’t have a lot of great alternatives [and carbon
capture makes more sense]. One of the most exciting stories about
energy in the last decade or so is how many other alternatives we
actually have in the power sector that are viable. When I started in
this field, we didn’t have better energy storage really; wind and
solar were, you know, 10 times as expensive as they are now. And so
the fact that we actually have alternatives to putting really, really
expensive equipment on very old coal-fired power plants is the result
of a lot of people working really hard to find alternatives.
Carbon capture is important when you don’t have other options. I think
we need to save those technologies and really emphasize those
technologies where we don’t have other options. And that means a lot
more R&D on what this looks like for a cement plant, and probably less
R&D on what this looks like for very old coal-fired power plants in
the U.S.
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