A carbon capture project at a hydrogen-production facility in Port Arthur, Texas — a US Department of Energy project, in partnership with Air Products and Chemicals — has captured more than 1 million metric tons of CO2 at the facility, the DOE says.
Using a technology called vacuum swing adsorption, the project captures more than 90 percent of the CO2 from the product stream of two commercial-scale steam methane reformers that would otherwise be emitted into the atmosphere. In addition to the secure storage, captured carbon from the project will be used to help produce additional, hard-to-access resources from existing nearby oil fields.
The announcement comes a year after President Obama announced his Climate Action Plan, which mandates steep carbon cuts from existing and new power plants — and will require coal plants to use carbon capture to comply with the new standard of 1,100 pounds of CO2 per MWh.
In total, DOE projects have captured and securely stored nearly 7.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to date. In just the last year since the release of the Climate Action Plan, these department-supported projects have stored approximately 2.8 metric tons, the DOE says.