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Bakersfield Mayor Harvey Hall
is clearly worried about the area's 17%
unemployment rate.
He says the local economy, largely
dependant on both agriculture and oil,
is currently in the worst shape he's
ever seen.
So when BP PLC and Rio Tinto, the big
British-Australian mining company,
decided on a Kern County site to
build the nation's first large facility
to remove 90 percent of the carbon from
coal-fired electricity, Hall became one
of its evangelists.
Hydrogen
Energy California is a member of
the Greater
Bakersfield Chamber of Commerce and
they have proposed a new
hydrogen-powered electricity generating
facility for the Kern County area that
would
capture and sequester (store) most
of its carbon related emissions. This
facility will be similar to the cleanest
natural gas power plants. Instead of
using natural gas to run its turbine
electrical generators, this plant will
use
hydrogen .
When it is completed, perhaps as early
as 2015, it will dramatically transform
some pastureland 40 miles west of
Bakersfield into a power plant that can
remove 90percent of the carbon emissions from
coal -- something that has never been
done before on a commercial scale.
The result will be local power
generation in a local area with growing
power demands - enough power for over
150,000 homes - along with 90% reduction
in the emission of
carbon dioxide, the most common
greenhouse gas. CO2 emissions will be
captured and stored deep underground,
preventing release into the atmosphere.
Beyond that, the facility called the
Hydrogen Energy California project --
HECA for short -- will begin to
nibble away at California's most vexing
carbon emission problem: its sprawling
transportation system. It is also being
designed to burn the charred residue
from petroleum refining, called
petroleum coke. The result will be
nearly carbon-free electricity.
(Normally, "petcoke" is exported to
Asia, where it is burned in conventional
power plants that vent the resulting CO2
into the atmosphere.)
California is not normally regarded as
being in "coal country" because it gets
most of its electricity from plants that
burn natural gas. But coal-producing
Western states, such as Wyoming, are
anxious to see whether California's
regulators will give power made from
"decarbonized" coal or petcoke premium
rates that make it competitive with
electricity made from natural gas and
wind power.
They are intensely interested because
between 20 and 30 percent of
California's electricity comes from out
of state, most of it produced by
coal-fired power plants.
Mayor Hall is a strong supporter of the
project not the least of which because
he is interested in the
1500 construction jobs
and 100 permanent operational positions
the $2.3 Billion Dollar project will
deliver to the local economy.
So far, the HECA project has charmed
state regulators. "It really is a
win-win-win-win-win," said Michael
Peevey, president of California's Public
Utilities Commission. He noted that
such carbon capture and storage projects
will have to happen "on a large scale in
California" if the state is going to
meet its goal of cutting carbon
emissions by 80 percent by 2050.
In May the Bakersfield Chamber board
took action. The Board adopted a
resolution on Carbon Caputure
Sequestration and Enhanced Oil Recovery
stating, "New investments in low
emission power plants and integrated
enhanced oil recovery could benefit
California and Kern County through new
energy projects that develop in-state
energy sector investment, create new
jobs, generate reliable low emissions
in-state electricity, increase local oil
production and provide nw local taxes."
To join the Greater
Bakersfield Chamber of Commerce,
click
HERE! To other California
chambers: Please let us know about your
Clean Energy successes and Green Members
so we can publish your story in the C of
C GreenSheet!
(Parts of this GreenSheet uses published
information from a recent New York Times
article.) |
