NET Power LLC announced that Toshiba Corporation, a world-class technology manufacturer, has joined The Shaw Group, a leading global engineering services firm, and Exelon Corporation, the leading U.S. competitive energy provider, to develop NET Power’s novel, clean, gas-fired power generation technology. Last week, Shaw announced that it was making a substantial investment in NET Power LLC.
NET Power’s system generates lower cost electricity while producing little-to-no air emissions. The technology utilizes a new, oxyfuel, high pressure, supercritical carbon dioxide cycle—named the Allam Cycle, after lead inventor Rodney Allam. Unlike traditional carbon capture technologies, the NET Power cycle inherently produces pipeline-ready CO2 for sequestration or use in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) without reducing plant efficiency or increasing costs.
EOR is a decades-old technology that uses carbon dioxide to extract stranded oil from mature oil fields while sequestering carbon dioxide below ground.
The US Department of Energy estimates that nearly 84 billion barrels of oil are recoverable using EOR in the US and 500 billion to 1 trillion barrels are recoverable worldwide; however, current sources of CO2 for EOR are only meeting a small fraction of that need, as most industrial CO2 capture technologies cannot produce cost-effective, EOR-ready CO2.
NET Power’s technology will have both the capacity and economics to enable the EOR industry to unlock this vast resource while simultaneously sequestering large quantities of carbon dioxide below ground.
