Montana, Canada battle greenhouse gas

BILLINGS – A $245 million climate-change initiative being pursued by officials in Montana and Saskatchewan could create North America’s first large-scale project for storage of greenhouse gas.

Gov. Brian Schweitzer says the project would capture a daily 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide produced by a coal plant in Canada, then send it through pipelines to a Montana site where it would be injected underground for storage.

Carbon dioxide – a byproduct of burning fossil fuels – is a major driver of climate change. Researchers and policymakers around the globe are scrambling for ways to capture the gas before it escapes into the atmosphere.

The Saskatchewan-Montana Project would target one of the world’s largest sources of greenhouse gases: coal-fueled power plants. Schweitzer says that to fund Montana’s share of the project, he will seek $100 million from the federal stimulus package.

With government officials aiming to get pipelines in place and start moving carbon dioxide within two years, the proposal is meant to jump-start carbon capture efforts now bogged down by political uncertainty and technological challenges.

“Carbon dioxide is a concern that’s global,” Schweitzer said. “What could be better than having two of the largest carbon dioxide-producing countries in the world working together on this?”

The carbon would be captured from an existing 300-megawatt power plant owned by Canada’s SaskPower. It then would be piped 50 to 60 miles south into northern Montana, where the gas would be injected deep underground for storage.

The carbon dioxide could later be withdrawn for use in oil production – a long-standing industry practice in which the carbon dioxide is pumped into the ground to help push oil out of aging reserves.

Other carbon capture proposals involving a new generation of coal plants are in the works in Wyoming, Ohio, Illinois, elsewhere in Montana, and in other states. Most involve a process known as gasification, where coal is turned into a gas before it’s used to generate electricity. That process makes it far simpler to capture carbon dioxide.

Yet most of those plants remain years from completion while developers work out kinks in technologies. The most prominent example, the industry- and government-sponsored FutureGen project in Illinois, has bogged down due to a soaring price tag and politics.

Building new, cleaner plants does not resolve the dilemma posed by the nation’s 600 working coal-fired power plants. Those produce a cumulative 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually.