Tenaska IGCC wins $417mn tax credit
Washington, 27 July (Argus) — Tenaska's proposed Taylorville integrated-gasification combined-cycle (IGCC) won a $417mn tax credit today from a federal government program intended to jumpstart clean energy projects.
Tenaska and MDL Holding of Louisville, Kentucky, are jointly developing the $3.5bn Taylorville Energy Center as a 716MW IGCC near Taylorville, Illinois, with Tenaska as the managing partner. The Taylorville plant will gasify Illinois coal to form synthetic methane and burn the gas for power, selling 602MW net to the grid. The project will also capture at least 65pc of its CO2 emissions.
The US Department of Energy (DOE) and US Treasury awarded the $417mn investment tax credit today to the Taylorville project, one of the largest yet given to a single project. DOE ranked it first among the bituminous coal projects competing for the credit. The plant also qualified last year for a $2.579bn loan guarantee from DOE and the US Treasury.
The project's Facility Cost Report must now be reviewed by the Illinois Commerce Commission and then given final approval by the Illinois General Assembly.
“As new environmental rules push conventional coal plants out of the market, Taylorville and projects like it must come online to replace that lost baseload power,” said Mark Pruitt, director of the Illinois Power Agency. “These baseload plants are needed to balance the supply and price volatility caused by the growing number of variable-output renewable power projects in our state's energy portfolio,” Pruitt said.
The Taylorville Energy Center is not the only coal plant with carbon-capture proposed by Tenaska. The company plans to build a supercritical pulverized coal plant in Sweetwater, Texas that would burn Powder River Basin coal and capture 85-90pc of its CO2 emissions. Tenaska just announced that it would use Fluor's Econamine FG Plussm capture technology at the Sweetwater plant. Capturing CO2 from the Sweetwater plant will be more energy-intensive than capture at the Taylorville IGCC. The nature of IGCC technology creates a fairly pure stream of CO2 that can be siphoned off during the gasification process.
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