Construction begins on world’s largest carbon-capture plant

Ars Technica : The W. A. Parish Generating Station in Thompsons, Texas, is a combination coal and natural gas power plant. Last week, construction began there of a carbon-capture facility funded by the US Department of Energy. The plant’s emissions will be bubbled through an amine solution to separate out the carbon dioxide. The gas will then be pressurized and piped to the nearby West Ranch oil field, where it will be injected into the ground to help extract oil that would be otherwise difficult to obtain. The CO₂ will remain sequestered in the ground. The project was originally planned to trap only a small portion of the emissions from the plant—those from the equivalent of 60 MW production out of the 3500 MW total. However, it was determined that the amount of CO₂ captured would be too little to extract the oil, so the trapping was expanded to catch the emissions from the generation of 240 MW. That will make it the largest carbon-capture facility in the world.