By Gwen Bristol

Carbon sequestration has been paying off for Basin Electric Power Cooperative since the late 1990s, when it began selling the greenhouse gas to help with enhanced oil recovery in Canada. For clean coal enthusiasts who want to see carbon capture at power plants as well, it’s a step in the right direction.

The carbon dioxide is currently sold by Basin Electric’s subsidiary Dakota Gasification Company as a byproduct of natural gas produced from coal at the Great Plains Synfuels Plant near Beulah.

According to Daryl Hill, media relations supervisor with Basin Electric, the Great Plains Synfuels Plant is the nation’s only commercial scale coal gasification plant producing natural gas from coal. A sister plant in South Africa uses the same types of gasifiers but produces liquid fuels like diesel and kerosene.

The process used in the gasification plant is called the Lurgi process. Floyd Robb with Basin Electric said it was developed during World War II by the Germans, who had plenty of coal but not as much access to petroleum.

“They were developing that process to fuel their war machine,” Robb said. The gasification plant itself grew out of the energy shortage in the 1970s.

“At that time the thinking was that natural gas was going to be gone and they wouldn’t be able to have any natural gas by the mid 80s or late 8os,” said Daryl Hill, media relations supervisor with Basin Electric Power Cooperative.

Hill said a group of gas companies in Michigan formed a consortium and announced that they were going to build 22 coal gasification plants twice the size of the Great Plains Synfuels Plant. The consortium planned to use the lignite coal reserves from North Dakota.

“By the time construction started they were down to a half-size plant,” Hill said.

The consortium invested $500 million and was able to get loan guarantees and price supports from the U.S. Department of Energy for another $1.5 billion. The plant cost $2.02 billion to construct.

The first gas from the plant was produced in July 1984. Hill said shortly afterward, the price of natural gas plummeted to around a dollar per decatherm. According to Floyd Robb, the consortium built the plant based on projections of about $7 per decatherm.

“When you build a plant on the basis of $7 gas and it drops to a dollar you don’t have much to work with,” Robb said. The consortium went back to the energy department and requested price supports to help them make up the difference, but the requests were denied. The consortium declared bankruptcy.

“Somewhere along the way a federal judge did say that the gas purchasers that had been set up still must buy all of the production of that plant as long as it operated,” Hill said. “There was a market for the gas but the owners had walked away.”

The plant was auctioned in 1985. The energy department won the bid for a $1 billion dollars and operated it for the next three years. They decided to sell it in 1988.

Basin Electric had a joint rail facility, water supply and fuel supply with the gasification plant. Robb said if the plant had shut down it would have cost Basin Electric’s membership about $37 million a year. The company held a special annual meeting where members gave the go-ahead to bid on the gasification plant.

“Our bid was ultimately selected, and as we say, the rest is history,” Hill said.

It’s a piece of history that may have put the company in a position to pave the way for carbon capture at power plants. Hill said the Great Plains Synfuels Plant is the site of the world’s largest carbon dioxide project in the world, with more than 150 million cubic feet per day being shipped to Canada.

“We’re also involved with a demonstration project at Antelope Valley that will capture about a million tons of carbon dioxide from the plant’s exhaust,” Hill said. “Depending on the results of a Front-End Engineering and Design (FEED) study to be completed later this year, it is possible construction of the project could begin later this year or early next year.”

The carbon dioxide captured at Antelope Valley station would be used in a Plains Carbon Dioxide Reduction (PCOR) partnership study on carbon sequestration.