Powerspan Pulls In $50M for Large-Scale Carbon Capture

powerspan-logoDespite what much of the coal industry likes to say about “clean coal,” capturing and storing carbon emissions from coal power plants remains an experimental technology that’s unproven at commercial scale. Powerspan Corp., however, has just pocketed $50 million in new financing from a heavy-hitting group of investors, and it says the money will be used to commercially deploy its carbon capture technology, in addition to covering some “general corporate purposes.”

Investors in the round include billionaire George Soros, RockPort Capital Partners, the Beacon Group, NGEN Partners (which has also just upped its stake in energy management startup EPS) and fossil fuel-based energy company Tenaska Energy. Tenaska, whose vice president, Greg Kunkel, testified (along with Google.org’s Dan Reicher) in a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing today on the Waxman-Markey energy bill, has a $7 billion plan in the works to capture and sell emissions from two coal power plants in Texas and Illinois. It’s betting big that “cleaner coal” will pay off, and lobbying hard for government help with carbon capture and storage projects, as ClimateWire noted earlier this week.

Mike Lebens, president and CEO of the engineering and operations group at Tenaska — which hopes to be on the other side of a financing round next year — said in a release from Powerspan today that he sees backing Powerspan as “a sound investment in a promising CO2 capture technology along with an opportunity to learn more about that cutting-edge technology as we explore future development projects in the energy industry.”

Like Tenaska, Powerspan says it can capture 90 percent of the carbon emissions from a coal power plant (although like we said, this is unproven technology at large scale). The New Hampshire-based company has put its so-called ECO2 technology (illustrated above) to the test in a 1MW pilot project in southeastern Ohio (working with a portion of a 50MW plant), and plans to get a commercial scale (120MW) demo project online at a second plant in North Dakota in 2012. Rather than simply shoving underground what could be as much as 1 million tons of carbon dioxide, the company plans to sell it for use in oil recovery. So if it works (a big if), it will be used to extract another fossil fuel, and then be stored underground.

Graphic courtesy Powerspan Corp.

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