American Electric Power will test a new carbon capture technology at its coal-fired Mountaineer Power Plant in New Haven, the company announced March 15.

AEP will validate a chilled ammonia carbon capture process developed by the global power generation products and services provider Alstom.

Planned to go into operation in 2008, the medium-scale West Virginia product validation will capture about 100,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) a year, according to AEP spokesman Pat Hemlepp. The operation will involve a portion of the gas that exits the 1,300-megawatt plant via a flue -- a portion equivalent to what would be emitted by a 30 MW plant.

Using what is learned from the product validation phase, a commercial-scale installation is planned in Oklahoma beginning in 2011, Hemlepp said. That project will capture up to 1.5 million tons of CO2 a year.

The chilled ammonia process may offer a solution for existing pulverized coal plants -- plants that many have thought would become too expensive to operate if federal climate change legislation regulates CO2 emissions.

While the next-generation Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) coal-fired technology has widely been touted as best for carbon capture, the chilled ammonia process can be built into or retrofitted into standard pulverized coal plants, Hemlepp said.

"Putting chilled ammonia on a plant is similar to putting on the scrubbers that are used to remove sulfur dioxide from the flue gas," he explained. "It's putting a chemical process onto the back end of a plant."

Early trials also show it may use less energy than other existing and proposed processes for removing CO2.

"Some of the technologies that people are looking at have a really cannibalistic effect on your power generation," Hemlepp said.

It would use 30 percent of power generated, reducing every 100 MW of capacity to only 70 MW.

"The Alstom technology looks as though it may be 15 to 20 percent, a sizable difference," he said.

The Mountaineer project is a demonstration not only of the chilled ammonia carbon capture process, but also of sequestration, or storage, of CO2 in a local geological formation.

That part of the project builds on a study AEP conducted with Battelle in 2002 through 2004 to test the suitability for CO2 sequestration of saline aquifers that underlie the region where the Mountaineer plant is located.

Carbon dioxide captured and compressed during the coming validation project will be injected on site to the depth of 9,000 feet.

AEP's announcement came just one day after Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers called for large-scale demonstration projects of integrated carbon capture and sequestration systems.

The call came in a long-awaited report, The Future of Coal: Options for a Carbon Constrained World, from MIT's Laboratory for Energy and the Environment.

"Carbon capture and sequestration," the report states, "is the critical enabling technology to help reduce CO2 emissions significantly while also allowing coal to meet the world's pressing energy needs."

The report's authors also urged the kind of openness to a range of technologies that is demonstrated by the AEP project.

"Today, IGCC appears to be the economic choice for new coal plants with CCS," they wrote.

"However, this could change with further (research, development and demonstration), so it is not appropriate to pick a single technology winner at this time, especially in light of the variability in coal type, access to sequestration sites, and other factors."

The MIT report calls for three sequestration projects in the U.S. and 10 elsewhere in the world and sets a target demonstration scale of 1 million tons of CO2 per year.

AEP's coming Oklahoma carbon capture installation will help to meet that goal. Its 1.5 million tons of CO2 a year is expected to be used in a demonstration of enhanced oil recovery, or injection to raise pressure in aging oil wells where pressure and production have dropped, Hemlepp said.