Way Down in the Hole, Part 6 – Carbon-Capture Projects Hold Promise, But Hurdles Remain …

As the years wore on and the number of successful projects remained small, they added a little fertilizer in 2018, not only enhancing the value of the credits but easing some of the limitations in the earlier legislation.

We’ve written a lot about carbon capture at RBN over the last few months as part of this series, starting with the basics of carbon capture and sequestration value chain, then continuing by taking an extensive look at the federal 45Q tax credit, including how it was designed and why the cost to capture CO2 from some industrial sources is uneconomic even at higher incentive levels.

Two obstacles that we’re going to look at today are the difficulties in scaling up some of the newer technology that came out of pilot and demonstration projects, as well as economic factors other than the value of the 45Q credit itself.

So far, a big part of that has to do with how the captured CO2 from the operating projects is sequestered — virtually all of it is used for EOR, which is where we begin our discussions today.

Denbury said in its annual report for 2021, filed in late February, that the plant can provide up to 30 MMcf/d of CO2 and that it expects deliveries to resume in 2022.

Construction of the plant began in 2010 and it was expected to start operations as early as 2014, but Southern Company and its subsidiary Mississippi Power, suspended activities involving the lignite-gasification section of the facility in 2017, opting to reconfigure the plant to run entirely on natural gas.

today, although neither has the size and scope of the Petra Nova or Kemper projects and one only tested carbon capture a few years ago and no longer captures and sequesters any CO2.

In the next blog in this series, we’ll look at one of the biggest CCS projects taking shape: ExxonMobil’s proposed Houston CCS Innovation Zone, which aims to capture and gather 50 million MT/year of CO2 from industrial and power facilities and permanently store it underwater in the Gulf of Mexico.

In addition to Waits’ version, a different recording of “Way Down in the Hole” was used for each season, including versions by The Blind Boys of Alabama, The Neville Brothers, DoMaJe, and Steve Earle.

Franks Wild Years was recorded during 1987 at Universal Recording in Chicago, and The Sound Factory and Sunset Sound in Hollywood.

He moved to Los Angeles in 1972, where he worked as a songwriter before securing his first record deal with Asylum Records.

…Read the full story