A long quest nears the end

THE POINT — Summit coal-fired plant seems close to becoming reality.

It seems as if the Permian Basin has been pursuing energy’s version of the Holy Grail, clean-coal technology, for a long time. Now there are a number of reasons to believe that vision is within reach.

Is the Summit Power Group Inc.’s planned $1.7 billion integrated gasification combined cycle coal power plant, which is designed to capture 90 percent of the carbon dioxide it produces, the end of the rainbow?

Well, details need to be worked out. But when Summit received a $350 million Clean Coal Power Initiative grant from the U.S. Department of Energy recently, the vision began to take shape.

Negotiations have been proceeding to acquire Summit’s preferred site near Penwell. That’s the same land that would have been home to FutureGen, the government’s version of a near-zero emission power facility. The Basin’s bid for that facility failed when a site in Illinois was chosen, but FutureGen hasn’t made a lot of progress since.

So it appears that the private sector could deliver a power plant long before a government version can be started.

If all goes as planned, this area (and Odessa especially) could harvest a lot of benefits. In the short term, it will provide a lot of construction jobs. In the future, there will be all sorts of returns — including permanent jobs at the plant, various spin-off businesses needed to support the facility and lots of research activity that could prove a boon to the University of Texas of the Permian Basin.

After all, part of the bigger picture is capturing CO2 produced by the power plant, storing it and selling it for enhanced recovery of crude oil. This is new technology and the process no doubt will include more efficient and profitable ways of dealing with coal-fired generation.   

 
It may take a while to get things rolling, but at least a completion date of 2014 has been rolled out.

That seems to indicate that a long-sought component of the varied energy offerings of this area is finally in reach.