The Cost Of EPA's Senseless CO2 Capture

 In April 24, 2024, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency passed a new rule that would require coal power plants that plan to continue operating after January 1, 2039, and new natural gas power plants that plan to begin operation on or after 2035 to capture at least 90% of their CO2 emissions.

Thankfully, researchers from the National Energy Technology Laboratory have provided the cost and performance estimates for retrofitting an existing coal power plant with Shell's CANSOLV CO2 capture system.

After retrofitting it with the CO2 capture system, the power output was reduced by 24% to 495 MW. In terms of money, the retrofit cost is about $988 million, or about $2 million/MW of net power output.

Taking the difference of 148 and 36, there are 112 coal power plants in the United States without any planned retirement year, having a total average capacity of about 96,000 MW. Using the NETL estimates, if we were to retrofit these 112 coal power plants to enable 90% carbon capture, the 24% net power output reduction would bring electricity production down to about 73,000 MW. Applying the retrofit cost of about $2 million/MW of net power output to the plants' reduced power output, we arrive at a projected cost of about $146 billion.

We haven't even gotten to retrofitting natural gas power plans, nor have we addressed the cost of replacing the tens of thousands of megawatts lost in the 24% production decrease of converted plants.

Using NETL's baseline natural gas combined cycle power plant, the numbers provided by NETL include a cost of about $1.05 billion to construct a new 992 MW plant without CO2 capture and a cost of about $1.87 billion to construct a new 883 MW plant with 90% carbon capture.

Higher concentrations of CO2 have enabled an increase in the growth, food production, water-use efficiency and drought resistance of plants, as well as the greening of Earth, as confirmed by NASA. According to NASA, 70% of this greening is attributed to "Fertilization" by CO2. 

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/05/09/the-cost-of-epas-senseless-co2-capture/