How Clean Is Your Capture? Co-Emissions from Planned US Power Plant Carbon Capture Project
This working paper uses information from the public engineering studies of six planned power plant CO2 capture retrofit projects to interpret and summarize their expected emission rates of four co-emission types: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, fine particulate matter, and ammonia.
Abstract
We use information from the public engineering studies of six planned power plant CO2 capture retrofit projects to interpret and summarize their expected emission rates of four co-emission types: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, fine particulate matter, and ammonia. We also estimate the health damage per MWh that will result from operating these power plants with CO2 capture projects while comparing it with the health damage per MWh for power plants without CO2 capture. Three of the power plants use coal and the other three use natural gas. The coal plants will cause estimated co-emission damage of $7.21 per MWh after adding CO2 capture, compared with $31.11 before adding CO2 capture and compared with an average of $65.85 across all US coal-fueled power generation. For the natural gas-fueled plants, the estimates are $3.09 after, $3.52 before, and $21.13 across all US natural gas-fueled generation. The large improvement at the coal plants is chiefly because the capture of CO2 requires the capture of almost all sulfur dioxide as well.
