(uplifting music) - More than a decade ago when the Dry Forks Power Station in Campbell County came online, consideration was given to creating space for carbon capture research and technology.

Now the integrated test center is doing that very thing here in the heart of coal country.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

This is "Wyoming Chronicle."

(uplifting music continues) - [Narrator] Funding for this program is made possible in part by the Wyoming Humanities Council, helping Wyoming take a closer look at life through the humanities, ThinkWY.org and by the members of the WyomingPBS Foundation.

Thank you for your support.

- I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

Welcome to "Wyoming Chronicle."

I'm joined today by Jason Begger.

He's the Managing Director of the Integrated Test Center in Gillette, and with us as well is Scott Quillinan and he's the Senior Research Director at the University of Wyoming School of Energy Resources.

Welcome to you both.

We're here today to talk about carbon capture and that's the prime directive of the ITC, the Integrated Test Center.

Who wants to tell me what carbon capture's all about?

- Yeah, great question, Steve.

So carbon capture is simply the art of separating out the CO2 molecules that come out of a flue gas of a coal-fired power plant, or the tailpipe of your car.

Here we're working on a coal-fired power plant.

- [Steve] We're here at the dry fork station.

It's right there.

That's a power plant, functioning power plant burning coal.

And so we put the ITC right next to it, which makes a lot of things easier to test out, correct?

- Yeah, that's right.

And you know, honestly, the types of technologies that are being tested here, all the likely customer is a utility.

- So we're not talking about someone with a centrifuge and an eyedropper in a lab and when this is some, this is a large scale testing effort underway in the industrial field, so to speak.

- This is, yeah.

Well, the types of projects that come here are, it's that next phase well beyond- - After.

- The bench scale, you think typical laboratory, you know, such as what the University of Wyoming has, you know, taking those really great ideas, that merit scale up and going okay, we understand the chemistry, the process.

Now let's try to engineer that and scale it up a little bit bigger to see if we can get the same efficiencies, understand the economics better, and really give a great snapshot to those prospective customers of carbon capture technologies that this thing works.

- Why is Wyoming so vital and pivotal in the world of carbon capture?

- So Wyoming is an energy state.

I'm biased, I call it the energy state.

It exports about 90% Of its energy to other states around the country, powering the nation.

That is in the form of natural gas to the west coast.

It's coal to the south, to the southeast.

All of that energy is leaving Wyoming as a barrel of oil, a rail car fill of coal.

Natural gas down the pipeline.

And it's selling into markets where customers want carbon free, reliable and affordable energy.

And so what we're developing here is the carbon free component.

So as those customers call for more and more carbon free energy, carbon capture is the way to give it to 'em.

What's going on here at the Integrated Test Center with carbon capture, they're developing the methodologies and proving technologies so that they can be exported and installed at other locations around the country that are using Wyoming based fuels.

- Coal has already, I mean, a couple of generations back, took some steps to be cleaner than it was prior to that.

But now we're talking about something more than a scrubber on the stack, we're.

- Yeah, you know, unfortunately carbon capture has become, or carbon management as a whole has become so politicized when in reality you should look at it as an engineering challenge.

And if you go back to say 1970, when the first Clean Air Act amendment was passed, you know, it was all about particulates.

You know, you had smog all over Pittsburgh and throughout the Midwest you had, you know, acid rain, you had haze.

And if you look at the emissions profile from a coal fire power plant today from where it was, it's gone to nothing.

Nobody talks about acid rain anymore because the industry developed SO2 scrubbers to pull that outta the air and given enough time and resources, the same thing can happen with CO2.

- So and in those days, carbon wasn't what they were talking about at that time, it was something else.

- Not at all.

- Now, carbon is the issue and it's important for market reasons, of course, environmental reasons, of course, we want to capture carbon for more reasons than just one.

And that's why so many people are interested in it.

- Couple of years ago, I heard former Senator Heitkamp from North Dakota say, "Carbon capture can mean different things to different people."

You know, states like North Dakota and Wyoming, you know, there's so much economic, you know, tax base lifeblood that the fossil energy industry provides to the state.

That yes, we need to find those to keep that tax base, those jobs going.

But for those who are, you know, are really into carbon emissions from an environmental perspective, carbon capture can be important that way too.

So it doesn't have to mean the same thing to everyone.

- I also think carbon capture provides a way to help diversify our economy.

So with all this interest in carbon capture, now we're starting to see industries developed around direct air capture and blue hydrogen.

So making hydrogen from natural gas, if you install carbon capture on that, that enables a whole new industry.

So I really do think that carbon capture is a key to our future here in Wyoming.

- There's this ongoing supply of what we call flue gas.

Is that right?

- Yeah, that's right, so Dry Fork Power Station is probably one of the newest coal fire power plants in the country, came online in about 2011.

And so it does have all the bells and whistles when it comes to emission control, mercury control, SOCs, NOCs, particulates.

And so what goes up the stack is already a very clean flue gas.

And so what the ITC does is we're able to divert about 5% of those power plant's emissions into a pipeline network that delivers flue gas at seven different test locations for technologies that come and plug and play their technologies.

- And even Big Coal sees the reality of this for the reasons that we talked about.

You mentioned Senator, and I know you're in there in politics earlier.

You try to stay out of that part of life, right?

You're a scientist, you're an engineer, you're running this test center.

How hard is that for you to do?

Are you able to wall that off pretty well or is that even possible?

- Well, interesting, Steve is I actually, I have a political background.

I was a Capitol Hill staffer in DC for five years.

- No kidding, really?

- You know, worked in-house government affairs for a number of companies and you know, I was brought on during Governor Mead's administration to help kind of kick this thing off because they realize that it's a political challenge as much as it is a technology challenge.

And so, you know, getting all the partners to kind of align in a shared vision, you know, the legislature appropriated the funds to make this thing happen.

So, you know, like it or not, there is a pretty heavy political component and that really is more of my background than the technical side.

You know, Scott's the geologist and you know, a lot of it takes a marriage between both sort of the policy and the science.

- Now, originally the School of Energy Resources, which is University of Wyoming school was not part of this, but more recently has linked up with it.

Tell us about that.

- Yeah, so fortunately, we've been able to absorb the Integrated Test Center and bring it over to School of Energy Resources, previously sat with the governor's office.

It's been a really easy transition and the reason for doing that is just so that we can continue to support the R&D functions that are ongoing here.

- Recently, some attention was generated by two projects that are using the facilities here to try to develop their own different approaches to this issue, what are the two enterprises?

- One is a company called Membrane Technology and Research, which is also known as MTR.

We love our acronyms around here, but they are a California based company that has developed a filter, more or less, a membrane filter that can separate CO2.

And so they have gone through a number of smaller scale testing, smaller modular type research, and now they're ready to develop a really big system, about 150 ton per day system that if successful, the next step beyond that is commercial full scale.

So it's a pretty major undertaking and it's about an $85 million project.

So it's not small by any means.

- Yeah so, and the other one is?

- Is Kawasaki Heavy Industries out of Japan.

Everybody knows Kawasaki, you know, you think motorcycles and things like that, but they're actually a very diversified heavy industrial company and they have a carbon capture division and they brought a technology over from Japan and it's a dry solid sorbent that when the flue gas is run through that powdered sorbent, it captures CO2 and so they're going to run a number of tests to try to understand the efficiency and effectiveness of that.

- This is not a science show and you're looking at a non-scientist.

What's the difference between the two approaches?

- The sorbent process is more of a chemical process where you have a dried powdered sorbent and it's like a classification of chemicals called amines, in amines like CO2.

And within the means there's other categories.

You got liquid solvents, you got dry absorbents.

This one is particular, it's a powder with that amine that attracts that CO2 and then when you heat that powder up, it releases that CO2, you cool it back down and then you can keep cycling it.

Whereas the MTR approach is more of a physical process where you're pushing that flue gas over a membrane, which then separates the CO2.

So there's lots of different processes for capturing CO2 and it's pretty broad categories.

- And so when the gas passes through the membrane, for example, the gas that comes out the other side is a more pure form of carbon, is that right?

- Right, so it's it's gonna be greater than 90% carbon dioxide.

- [Steve] Yeah, CO2.

- And at that point it can be compressed and it can be put down a well, and the interesting thing, when you compress CO2, it's no longer a gas, it goes to a really dense phase fluid.

And so when you inject it down the well bore, then you're injecting a fluid, just like a wastewater, just injecting a fluid deep down in the subsurface into the rock formation.

- And it's considered relatively benign in that form, especially in the storage vessel, so to speak, that you're talking about.

- Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely.

CO2 is a natural substance.

- [Steve] It exists.

- Yeah.

- Fizz is my soda pop.

- Right.

- What happens to the membrane itself?

Is that a contaminated thing in some way or how is it dealt with?

- Similar to other filters.

You know, they can be used for quite a long time, you know, and then when they're done completely, you know, plugged up, clogged up, they would be disposed and replaced, but you know, it's not a hazardous material or anything.

- That's not the issue then.

- When it's all said and done, it's you know, oversimplifying but akin to your furnace filter.

You know, you replace it.

- And how about the sorbent, is it?

- Yeah, again, you know, it has a certain life and part of the test that they're doing here at the ITC is to understand how many times they can cycle that, run it through that heating and cooling cycle.

But once it's all said and done, you know, they as a part of their process have developed appropriate disposal methods to ensure that, you know, there's no environmental harm.

- It's gonna be the job of the companies to figure out how to use this in the marketplace.

But it's your understanding that these, for example, the two that you've just described to me, they could both exist in a future market, or are we trying to establish an industry standard that this is what everybody's gonna use, or?

- Well, my opinion is there are gonna be lots of different processes that are gonna have different benefits and weaknesses and strengths and applications, you know, and my mind, it's similar to, you wanna go buy a pickup, you can buy a Chevy Ford Dodge.

Same way with carbon capture.

You know, you can find a particular process company that works well.

- Makes sense for you, for your company or your operation.

- Right and a lot of it depends on the CO2 concentration in the flue gas.

So things like coal and cement that have a higher CO2 concentration might prefer a membrane based technology, but something that is like natural gas fired power plant might prefer an amine type technology.

So they will be sort of designed for whatever source they're trying to capture from.

- The gas is set aside a percentage of it and so they're trying to find out over in the building next to us how this works on a bigger scale.

How would a customer use it exactly, if say, if I've got a power plant down south somewhere?

- Yeah, well, ideally, you know, they would come out here, they could see the process, see a project like MTR's, how their membrane system works, you know, the footprint, the size that it takes, it is an additional unit next to a power plant.

Not every power plant might have the physical space for something like that, so get a sense of what it is.

You know, they would contract with a company like MTR to say, okay, can you design a unit to meet the specifications of our particular power plant and build one out?

- An interesting point, when you drive around the Gillette area in Camel County here, you see a lot of the big power stations been there, you know, that's what it is.

But they're not the same.

It's not a cookie cutter model at all.

No, they've different designers, different plans, different eras.

- [Scott] Absolutely.

- [Steve] And this is what part of what the challenge for the company's testing here now have to meet as well.

- [Jason] Yeah and different, you know, coal varies based upon the basin.

Heck, it can be different in different areas within the Powder River Basin and so the flue gas constituencies are slightly different.

And so, you know, every power plant is really designed specific to the type of coal that they do plan to burn.

- Two projects broke ground recently.

What's the capacity, so to speak, of the ITC would eventually in years to come, more companies would come?

- I guess in a perfect world, you know, the ITC has proved its purpose.

If a technology emerges and Dry Fork Power Station says we wanna build a full scale carbon capture facility and you know, and that might actually take up the space that the ITC presently uses, but it can also, hopefully that technology, those lessons can be deployed around the country or even around the world.

- And so I think it's important here to bring in the storage components that are being developed at this location.

- [Steve] Sure, there's the capture and then what to do with it afterwards.

- Yeah, so Wyoming Carbon Safe, it's a DOE funded project.

- That's the Federal Department of Energy.

- Correct, yep, from the Department of Energy, the School of Energy Resources leads this project, we started developing the storage components at this location so in 2019, we've drilled a 10,000 foot deep well, and in 2021, early 2022, we drilled a second one.

And those wells were the first wells drilled in Wyoming that meet the Class VI standards for CO2 injection.

- The Class VI standards?

- I'll unpack that.

- Okay.

(Scott laughs) - Class VI is the type of well that you need to inject CO2 into the subsurface.

So this is a whole completely new type of well class and permit that really ensures the safety of CO2 storage and injection.

As you go through permitting these wells, you really look at risk, you look at safety, you look at mitigation, you look at everything surrounding it so that we know when we inject the CO2 into those wells, it's going to be permanent and safely stored.

So these two wells at this location are the first two wells in Wyoming that are drilled up to these new standards.

And soon we'll be submitting the full permits for those to be converted over to Class VI.

- Does the Class VI standard get achieved because you've drilled a well into a particular type of underground structure, geologically speaking?

Or is it the way it's drilled, the way it's monitored afterwards?

All of those things maybe?

- It's the way it's drilled, it's the formation it targets, it's the materials that are used to construct the well, it's the cement that's used to construct the well.

And so all of those allow for the injection of CO2 safely.

The interesting thing about that project is just like the capture technologies that this location are proving up commercial capture, the drilling of those wells and the work and the characterization work that have gone into those is also proving up the commercialization of carbon storage at this location.

It's the only place in the country doing this.

- So we can talk about that as a job creator in the future.

- [Scott] Absolutely.

- Are these, would you call 'em part of the green economy that supposedly can generate all these millions of new opportunities?

Is carbon capture one of those or does it sort of straddle the border, do we think?

- Our goal is to get to net zero.

- Yeah.

- And so, installing carbon capture on a coal-fired power plant, a natural gas fired power plant, if it gets us to net zero carbon, it's a green energy technology.

- Part of what SER does, we're educating young people at the University of Wyoming into these fields, correct?

We'll produce a generation of graduates who know about this stuff.

- Absolutely.

And we're really proud to share that we are the first university in the country to have a CCUS certificate or Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage certificate.

So our undergraduates, as part of their undergraduate degree, can be certified in carbon capture and storage.

The jobs that are associated with carbon capture and storage really closely mirror what we have in the oil and gas industry.

And so we already have that expertise in Wyoming.

So as these projects begin to deploy, we'll really be just bringing that knowledge and expertise over from the industries we already have.

- Jason, what qualifies someone to become Managing Director of ITC?

- You know, I think where I was really brought in is I had the good fortune of going through leadership Wyoming with former Governor Mead.

And so I had developed a little bit of a relationship there.

So back in 2014 when the legislature appropriated money to construct an ITC, it was, typically what legislatures do is like, we'll give you money, but you need to answer this laundry list of questions first.

You know, you need to identify a host site, you need to find other partners, you need to find those first tenants, those types of things.

And so those questions were more political coalition building questions as opposed to technology questions and so.

- [Steve] It's on your street, yeah.

- Yeah, so the coalition building is probably more the political side.

- How difficult, has that been difficult for you?

Do you find that the people in Wyoming that you need to deal with are receptive to what's happening here?

- Wyoming is a unique animal, politically.

You know, we love our fossil energy.

You know, sometimes, you know, the tendency is like, oh, climate change isn't real.

We don't need to be wasting money on like that.

But I think the game changer was when our leadership started talking about whether you think it's real or not, it's a political and economic reality and if we want to continue to have the billions of dollars in tax revenue and the thousands of jobs and everything good that comes from the fossil energy industry, you need to have the technologies to give the customers what they want and right now it's low carbon electricity.

And so that kind of changed the narrative and made it a lot easier.

- I think the folks in Wyoming have a really high energy IQ.

They get it.

They know what's behind their light switch.

They know what it takes to power the nation.

And so when you start talking about carbon capture and storage, it's a really, it's a different conversation in Wyoming.

It's another energy project and it brings jobs, it brings revenue and it's really, in my opinion, in working with our communities, it's been really well received.

- And one of the things that always struck me, maybe with amusement or some other word would be better, was the always the talk politically about coal country.

And here's a guy from Ohio or a guy from Kentucky, or a guy from Pennsylvania, guy from West Virginia, bless them all, all important people.

Coal country right here.

- [Scott] Yeah.

- That we've got, and this is happening.

Is there an ITC in West Virginia somewhere?

I mean, I'm not trying to criticize or make fun of any of it, but I'm just saying here in the heart of what actually is coal country, this is where this is happening too.

It's what sort of what you're getting at.

- [Scott] Right.

- Our industry is the one that's making this possible.

- Right, you know, the ITC is one of a kind.

Actually the only comparable facility to it in the world where you can access post combustion flue gas is a facility in Norway.

- Really?

- So you know, what Wyoming has done here.

And then you add in the carbon safe storage component just, you know, right next door, it's a one of a kind facility.

You know, nowhere really in the world can you get what you get here.

- So can this be done?

How optimistic are you that we can get to the point where there would be carbon to be captured, controlled, stored to the point that these market and environmental imperatives that are becoming so important now can actually be met?

Is it?

- We need energy.

We need reliable, we need affordable energy and we're gonna need a lot of it.

And so we need to be able to manage our carbon emissions to access all of the energy sources that we have access to.

I've been working in carbon capture and storage since about 2005 so it's, I've been doing it for a while and I can tell you when I started I thought, well this is too expensive.

This is a pipe dream.

Nobody's going to buy into this.

Here we are in 2023, it's a different world.

Controlling our carbon emissions is a real thing.

And I think unless we're willing to hang up our cell phones, turn off our lights, I think installing carbon capture on all of these different energy sources is really the way we're going to go.

- Is Wyoming coal better suited for these than the so-called harder hotter coal from another part of the country?

- I don't think that's an issue.

Why we need it to work for Wyoming coal is Wyoming supplies 40% of the nation's coal.

And so if it works on Wyoming coal, we're moving a long way.

- The ITC was the start of something that's now become bigger than just itself, correct?

There's some sort of some momentum, some snowballing almost.

- Yeah, absolutely.

So the Integrated Test Center was first and because the Integrated Test Center was here, we were able to recruit the Wyoming Carbon Safe Project and then along came the WyIC facility or the Wyoming Innovation Center that's working on coal products.

And then just down the street in Upton, Wyoming, there's the Rare Earth Element Demonstration Project.

So this region, because they're willing to allow energy technologies to be tested here, is really developing an economy around field demonstrating energy technologies.

It's really cool.

- People don't continue to flock to Silicon Valley because you know, housing is cheap and you know, it's inexpensive to live and there's low taxes.

The reason people come there and companies continue to come there is because it's a center of the knowledge base for the tech world.

When you think about carbon captures, the emerging industry and really there isn't a center for it yet.

And so by building out, you know, the ITC, carbon safe, the innovation center, all those sort of things, if you can develop that center of gravity, all of a sudden maybe a lot of things start flowing in to Wyoming in this part of the world.

- Well, we use our imagination and it could take us places in our state.

- [Scott] Absolutely.

- Jason Begger, Scott Quillinan, University of Wyoming School of Energy Resources, Integrated Test Center.

I wish you well and thanks for being with us on "Wyoming Chronicle."

- [Jason] Yeah, thank you.

- [Scott] Thanks, Steve.

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