Water shortage could threaten Texas clean coal vision

Nolan County and Sweetwater officials and businessowners toured the site for the proposed
Tenaska Trailblazer Energy Center - a Carbon Capture and Storage facility -  east of
Sweetwater, Texas.
(Photo courtesy of Tenaska)

Texas might have lost the federally sponsored FutureGen project to Illinois but new legislation taking effect on September 1, 2009,  will create significant state-level incentives for the development of clean-coal technology.

“Texas produces more carbon dioxide than any other state, but it also has the greatest potential to sequester carbon underground”, said Texas House Representative Warren Chisum (R). “Our bill could eventually lead to a multi- billion carbon sequestration industry in Texas”.

The clean-coal bill provides tax incentives for the construction of coal-fueled or petroleum coke-fueled electric generating facilities capable of separating the CO2 out of the coal-burning or coal-gasifying process and piping it deep underground.

The technique has already been put into commercial practice. CO2 is for example stripped out of natural gas produced at the Sleipner Field in the Norwegian North Sea and injected into a layer of porous sandstone 2,600 feet under the surface, and the Weyburn project has been taking the CO2 produced at a synfuels plant in North Dakota and sent it to oilfields in Saskatchewan.

But although the clean coal technology has the ability of reducing CO2 while providing for the world’s growing energy demand there are potential problems. CO2 leaks is one, accessibility to water another. A new report by the Australian Water Commission, finds that a coal-fired plant that includes carbon capture and storage (CCS) “could be one-quarter to one-third more water intensive” than traditional coal fired plants.

That is bad news for Texas. Droughts and a growing population are already putting pressure on water supplies and affecting the economy.

“Ensuring reliable water supplies for the future and balancing those supplies appropriately between rural and urban areas, and among agricultural, municipal, industrial and electricity-generating users is the challenge of our day”, says Texas Comptroller Susan Combs.