Unit at Great Plains Synfuels Plant

A 2009 review of commercially available CO₂ capture technologies identified 17 facilities (using both chemical and physical capture solvents) in current operation (table below). These include four natural gas processing operations and a synthesis gas (syngas) production facility in which more than 1 million tons of CO₂ are captured per year. The largest (a natural gas processing operation in Wyoming) captures 4 million tons per year. The facilities capturing the highest volumes of CO₂ are all associated with gas streams containing relatively high concentrations of CO₂.

Capturing CO₂ from more dilute streams, such as those generated from power production, is less common. For example, several power plants produce food-grade CO₂. Although there are commercially available CO₂ capture technologies, one of the key barriers to their widespread commercial deployment is the lack of experience with these systems at the appropriate scale at power plants. Currently operating CO₂ capture systems in coal-based power plant applications include amine and chilled ammonia solvent systems that process about 75,000 to 300,000 tons of CO₂ per year. By comparison, a single 550-megawatt (MW) net output coal-fired power plant capturing 90 percent of the emitted CO₂ will need to separate approximately 5 million tons of CO₂ per year. 

In order to address some of the barriers to widespread commercial deployment of CO₂ capture, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) plans to conduct several large-scale demonstrations of currently available technologies as part of the Clean Coal Power Initiative (CCPI).  These include three demonstrations of CO₂ capture from integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) power plants and three from conventional power plants.  The generating capacities at the demonstration facilities range from 60 to 582 MW, and total CO₂ captured ranges from 0.5 to 3 million tons per year. The demonstrations will be initiated from 2014 to 2016, and the projects will run for two to three years.  In addition, a first generation oxy-combustion technology CO₂ capture demonstration project is planned under the FutureGen 2.0 Initiative that will involve repowering an existing 200-MW power plant located in Illinois. Finally, additional CO₂ capture demonstration projects are planned under the Industrial Carbon Capture and Storage (ICCS) program. Several of the ICCS projects are pursuing capture technologies that are similar to those being demonstrated for power plants. These projects are of similar magnitude to the CCPI capture demonstrations (90 percent capture, 0.9 million to 4 million tons/year captured).