NRG Energy has been selected by the US DoE to receive up to $154 million, including funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, to build a post-combustion carbon capture demonstration unit at its WA Parish plant, southwest of Houston. The proposed project was submitted under the Clean Coal Power Initiative Program (CCPI), a cost-shared collaboration between the federal government and private industry to demonstrate carbon capture and storage technologies in advanced coal-based, power generation.

Scheduled to begin operating in 2013, NRG’s carbon capture demonstration project at WA Parish will use Fluor Corporation’s advanced Econamine FG Plus technology to process flue gas from the plant equivalent to 60 MW.

It will be designed to capture 90% of incoming carbon dioxide, or about 400 000 metric tons of CO2 annually. Once captured, the carbon dioxide will be compressed and used for enhanced oil recovery.