The Southeastern Electric Exchange’s (SEE, an association of investor-owned utilities) 2014 Industry Excellence Chairman’s Award has been given to Southern Company for its 25 MW carbon-capture demonstration project — the world’s largest demonstration of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) on a pulverized-coal power plant.
Located at Southern Company subsidiary Alabama Power’s Plant Barry near Mobile, Alabama, the project captures approximately 150,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually, supplied to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Southeast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership and transported through a 12-mile pipeline to the Citronelle oil field — where it is injected and permanently stored 9,500 feet underground in a deep geologic formation.
The start-to-finish carbon-capture demonstration on the scale of the Plant Barry facility is an important step toward establishing the technology’s viability and economic feasibility.
“The carbon-capture demonstration at Plant Barry represents an investment in our energy future through the development of technologies that will help provide clean, safe, reliable and affordable energy to customers using America’s energy resources,” said Southern Company’s Chief Environmental Officer Dr. Larry S. Monroe.
Southern Company leads the U.S. electric utility industry in robust, proprietary research and development. The utility also received an Industry Excellence Award in production for the development of PowerGraphiX — a proprietary, high-performance human/machine interface that improves plant operators’ situational awareness that has the potential to set a new standard for the power generation industry.
Designed by a team of Southern Company plant operators, trainers and process-control engineers, the system replaces multiple monitors displaying digital data with a tiered system of monitors that displays groupings of related information in analog format. This enables plant operators to better anticipate problems, make correct diagnoses and respond properly.
Source: Fierceenergy.com
