Summit Gets DOE Agreement

WASHINGTON, D.C. The U.S. Department of Energy has moved the “clean coal” plant one step further along.

The U.S. Department of Energy announced last week that it awarded a cooperative agreement to Summit Texas Clean Energy LLC to design, build and demonstrate a coal-gasification plant.

The project was a third-round selection under DOE’s Clean Coal Power Initiative, a cost-shared collaboration between the federal government and private industry.

STCE, a project development company of Summit Power Group Inc., will build the new plant in Penwell. It is designed to generate enough electricity for more than 165,000 homes.

About 90 percent of the CO2 produced from the facility will be captured, compressed and transported using existing regional pipelines to the oilfields of the Permian Basin for use in the process of enhanced oil recovery.

The cost-shared project will be administered by the DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and the National Energy Technology Laboratory.

The estimated total cost for the project is $1.73 billion. The DOE share is limited to $350 million, or approximately 20 percent of the total project costs.