Green Gas
Forbes|February 28, 2017

A revolutionary $150 million power plant promises to capture all its polluting carbon—and produce electricity at the same low cost as a dirty facility.

Christopher Helman
Green Gas

GROWING UP IN ENGLAND after World War II, “all the youngsters like me were obsessed with aircraft,” says Rodney Allam. “I had a picture on my wall of Chuck Yeager when he broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1, the earliest turbine-driven aircraft.” Those high-powered machines were inspirational. Allam became a chemical engineer and went to work at the U.K. division of Air Products & Chemicals, based in Allentown, Pennsylvania. There in the 1970s, he became obsessed with an idea: how to capture the carbon-dioxide emissions from the U.K.’s giant coal-burning power plants? He already knew where to put the CO2. BP and Royal Dutch Shell would jump at the chance to inject it into their vast oil fields in the North Sea. Injecting the gas (which acts as a solvent to free up stubborn crude oil) has long been a common practice in West Texas fields, where oil companies tap naturally occurring reservoirs of CO2. But there were none of those in England.

Allam explored various bolt-on methods to grab the CO2 from a giant 2,400-megawatt coal plant in Scotland. But none came close to viability. For a simple reason: They were too expensive. He became obsessed with making carbon capture affordable: first for the technical challenge and then out of an impetus to slow CO2-induced global warming. “I tried like hell,” he says, “but I gave it up in the early 1990s—couldn’t make it work.”

This story is from the February 28, 2017 edition of Forbes.

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This story is from the February 28, 2017 edition of Forbes.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.