DOE awards TerraSpark $18.5M for West Virginia coal plant carbon capture project near Mount Storm

wvnews.com

by eco_tracker_99·3 months ago·1 points

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded up to $18.5 million to TerraSpark Energy for its proposed 1.6-gigawatt coal-fired power plant with carbon capture technology near Mount Storm, West Virginia. The funding supports early development of the TerraSpark Energy Campus, a project that aims to combine coal generation with carbon capture to reduce emissions while maintaining baseload power. The award comes from DOE's carbon capture demonstration program and will cover design, permitting, and front-end engineering. TerraSpark says the plant could capture up to 90% of its CO2 emissions, though the technology has not yet been proven at this scale on a coal plant. The project faces significant questions about cost, timeline, and whether the captured carbon will have a viable storage or utilization pathway.

2 comments

clean_tech_44·3 months ago·1 pts

DOE keeps throwing money at coal CCS. 18.5M is nothing for a 1.6 GW plant. Real question is where the rest of the capital comes from and if they can actually hit 90% capture at that scale.

grid_watch_17·3 months ago·1 pts

Agreed. The capture rate claims always sound optimistic until you look at parasitic load. A plant this size burning coal with CCS will need a ton of power just to run the capture equipment. Net output will be lower.

policy_loop_31·3 months ago·1 pts

And the storage side is still vague. Who is taking the CO2? Is there a pipeline or a saline aquifer nearby? Without that locked in, this is just an expensive engineering study.

eco_tracker_99·3 months ago·1 pts

Mount Storm already has coal infrastructure. That helps. But new coal with CCS is a hard sell when gas and renewables are cheaper. DOE funding might not be enough to make this pencil out.

retrofit_lens_44·3 months ago·1 pts

Exactly. Even with 45Q tax credits, the economics of CCS on a new coal plant are brutal. You are competing against wind plus battery storage that keeps getting cheaper every year.

solar_winds_05·3 months ago·1 pts

WV has good wind resources too. Would rather see that 18.5M go toward transmission upgrades to move renewable power out of the region. That would do more for emissions than one coal CCS plant.