I follow lots of really smart energy people on here who I learn from every day. Except, most often, when it comes to carbon capture. A real lack of understanding of various projects, their actual purpose/value/issues, and tons of misplaced and gleeful “gotcha” conclusions.

It feels very much like certain crowds using Solyndra to confirm their priors.

Petra Nova demonstrates a tech at scale, finally. There are of course abnormalities and aspects that are not replicable, but their presence doesn’t some how undermine that first purpose.

The fact that the CC unit is run by a Cogen plant is not a “gotcha” to those that paid attention to the project. They did what they had to do to get the CC unit up and running. Yes, that means the emissions benefit is reduced. But that’s not the main purpose of this FOAK demo.

It’s also well-known that the CC is only on a portion of the full plant. Again, rolling out a tech for the first time at massive scale. You’re not going to put it on the whole plant. It was the responsible thing to do. Not a “gotcha.”

And take the outages. The CC unit, which is the important part here, was not “out 1 out of every 3 days.” The largest outages were planned at the plant and at the off-the-shelf Cogen unit:

An aside, this is sort of like Kemper when people say it proves carbon capture doesn’t work. All Kemper proved was that their fancy new gasifiers didn’t work, were likely scaled much too fast, and the project execution was a mess.

My main point is to just accurately discuss the issues. We need to both prove tech at scale, and prove we can make the business case work.