GLENROCK — The smokestacks towering above the Dave Johnston Power Plant are a fixture on the skyline outside of Glenrock, and a group of engineering and technology experts are meeting there this week with the goal of making them obsolete.
That’s according to Damian Beauchamp, president and chief development officer with 8 Rivers, a decarbonization technology company based in Durham, North Carolina.
Beauchamp said his company is developing technology that uses pure oxygen to burn hydrogen and carbon monoxide generated from coal, and this process creates a stream of pure carbon dioxide.
This CO2 is then recirculated through a new type of turbine that will not need smokestacks to release emissions.
“Whenever you have a gas turbine or steam turbine, you need molecules to flow past the blades,” Beauchamp told Cowboy State Daily. “If you burn any fossil fuel with pure oxygen, all you get is CO2 and water. And so, the innovation was to take the CO2 from the exhaust and continually recycle it in the system.”
That means the CO2 that once exited Dave Johnston’s smokestacks would be used to instead power the turbine and ultimately — if all goes according to plans discussed this week — no emissions will emit from the stacks.
“I think that it will be a silver bullet,” said Beauchamp. “There's kind of a tangential benefit that you’ll be able to utilize coal, have no particulate emission and now eliminate the CO2.”
The recirculated CO2, said Beauchamp, ultimately will be piped out of the power plant and sequestered underground.
“And in the state of Wyoming, when you think about economic development and energy development beyond sequestration, you could also look at enhanced oil recovery as a solution to use the CO2, to stimulate and produce additional low-carbon oil revenue and jobs for the state,” added Beauchamp.
Cowboy State Daily reached out to Rocky Mountain Power for comment about this week’s meetings at the Dave Johnston Power Plant.
Rocky Mountain Power responded by referring to a March 29 statement confirming the working relationship between the utility, 8 Rivers and the engineering-design firm Wood.
The press release mentions the Wyodak coal-fired power plant near Gillette, leaving open the possibility that the engineering and technology developed by Wood, 8 Rivers and Siemens Energy could be applied there instead of the Dave Johnston Plant.
In the release, Rocky Mountain Power said the partnership comes with, “An expectation of advancing to various phases of engineering and design studies after a site is selected.”
Whether it’s at Wyodak or Dave Johnston, Wood, 8 Rivers and Siemens Energy are moving ahead with implementing a technology that burns coal using pure oxygen, and then uses the CO2 produced along the way to generate electricity.
What happens to the CO2 after that, said Beauchamp, remains to be determined. But he said it won’t be emitted as exhaust into the atmosphere.
“If you have an exhaust that's 100% CO2, you have a pure substance,” said Beauchamp, who earlier in his career was profiled by Forbes in its annual “30 Under 30” feature.
“Nobody in the world is going to want to waste that substance,” added Beauchamp. “And especially when you want to eliminate emissions, now it's much cheaper to take and sequester that CO2.”
Smokestack Killers?
Last year, 8 Rivers entered into a MOU with PacifiCorp — Rocky Mountain Power’s parent company — to evaluate a potential carbon capture project at one of the utility’s existing power plant sites in Wyoming.
As detailed in a March 13 statement, “The project will deploy 8 Rivers’ proprietary Allam-Fetvedt Cycle (AFC) power cycle technology and direct-fired supercritical CO2 turbines the company is developing along with Siemens Energy.”
Peter Rice is the Siemens Energy account manager working with 8 Rivers as the two firms collaborate to bring a new generation of oxy-combustion turbine online in Wyoming.
Rice confirmed this new technology could retire the smokestacks at the Dave Johnston Plant.
“Those will be a monument,” Rice told Cowboy State Daily on Tuesday. “The power that will be produced from coal and coal blends will be emission free.”
Rice emphasized that the smokestack-killing technology on course to be implemented in Wyoming is indeed a big deal.
“It definitely is revolutionary,” said Rice. “I would give credit to 8 Rivers for developing that. It would be the first of its kind at this scale.”
A massive team of engineers is currently working on the turbine that promises to produce “dispatchable clean energy” using coal, said Rice.
David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.
