Proposed facility in Linden would capture CO2
PurGen, a $5B plant, would pipe the gas beneath the ocean floor
Sunday, April 26, 2009
BY BRIAN T. MURRAY
Star-Ledger Staff
Some scientists call it a hope for reducing the industrial greenhouse gases blamed for global warming; skeptics say it is the new frontier of dumping.
“Carbon capture and sequestration” is an emerging — critics say unproven — technology that takes carbon dioxide or CO2 that normally would spew from industrial smokestacks and pumps it deep into the earth. Once there, it is, ostensibly, trapped forever, unless something goes wrong.
Last month, Linden planners received designs for a $5 billion project called “PurGen.” It is a 500 megawatt, coal-fueled facility using a 100-mile, underground pipeline to push as much as 10 million tons of CO2 annually — emissions from the new plant and eventually neighboring industrial operations — to a point 70 miles off the coast and about 2,200 yards beneath the Atlantic Ocean.
The dialogue over the carbon sequestration worst-case scenario has come out of the laboratory and into New Jersey’s backyard with a plan to link the technology for the first time to a large, commercial electric plant proposed in Linden.
The proposal took on greater significance last week, when the Environmental Protection Agency declared CO2 and other greenhouse gases a public health danger — triggering a regulatory process that may drastically restrict emissions from existing and new power and industrial plants.
Critics question the viability of piping CO2 under the ocean floor in a heavily traveled area and say the state should instead pursue windmill and solar technology. Proponents argue the plant will provide a reliable source of energy without spewing pollutants into the air.
“With New Jersey importing about a third of its electrical energy, the 500 megawatts coming from this plant will reduce the state’s reliance on power that comes predominantly from uncon trolled dirty coal plants out of state … while also addressing New Jersey’s environmental challenges,” said Bradley Campbell, the lawyer spearheading the project.
A former commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Protection now in private practice, Campbell was hired to steer SCS Engineers of Massachusetts through the maze of local, state and federal approvals needed for the project. The plant is slated for a former DuPont chemical site along the Arthur Kill, with the pipeline running under Raritan Bay to the ocean.
Frank Smith and Jim Croyle, two principals of SCS, said their commercial energy plant will be the “first of its kind in the world” to link carbon capture with another so-called “clean energy” process known as coal gasification or Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle technology.