A leading carbon-capture technology will be tested next year on a refinery in Mongstad, Norway.
The chilled ammonia facility is designed to capture at least 80,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually from flue gases generated by the Statoil refinery's cracker unit or from a new combined-cycle heat and power plant being constructed on the plant site.
If the test goes well, Statoil plans to use the technology in a much larger unit capable of capturing more than 2 million tons of CO2 annually, making it one of the largest refinery applications of the chilled ammonia technology in the world.
Philippe Joubert, president of Alstom Power Systems, which designed the CO2-capture technology, said in a statement the Statoil project "represents our mutual commitment to both the [chilled ammonia] technology and society at large."
In a second announcement yesterday, Alstom said it had reached agreement with the Swedish firm E.ON to launch a 5-megawatt, CO2-capture demonstration project at the gas-fired utility's Kalshamn Power Plant in southern Sweden.
The announcements reflect Paris-based Alstom's growing global footprint in the emerging CO2-capture and sequestration business (Greenwire, May 15).
Earlier this year, Alstom and U.S. utility giant American Electric Power announced they would jointly pursue CO2 capture pilot projects at two AEP coal-fired power plants in West Virginia and Oklahoma.
Construction of the first AEP pilot project -- on a 30-megawatt unit at the 1,300-megawatt Mountaineer Plant in New Haven, W.Va. -- will follow preliminary tests on a 5-megawatt unit at We Energies' Pleasant Prairie power plant in Wisconsin.
Along with coal-fired electric power plants, refineries are among the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, followed by chemical plants, iron and steel mills, and paper mills, according to the Environmental Roadmapping Initiative, a project of the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Bob Hilton, an executive with Alstom Power Environmental Control Systems, based in Knoxville, Tenn., said Alstom chose the Norwegian refinery for its first major test of the technology on cracker flue gases due to its history of collaboration with Statoil and other European industry partners.
He said the company will seek out similar partnerships with U.S. refiners as opportunities become available.
Advertisement
