The Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) has issued an air permit for Indiana Gasification’s new clean coal facility. The issuing of the permit is a major step toward construction of the state-of-the-art plant.
The IG facility will produce substitute natural gas for Hoosier consumers and CO2 that will be piped to the Gulf States, which will enable a increase in oil production in America by tens of millions of barrels per year. The facility will be the cleanest coal plant ever permitted in the United States and will create 1,500 jobs. Construction on the plant will take approximately 3 years and require 1,000 workers. Upon completion the plant will employ 200 people and the annual demand for 3.5 million tons of coal is expected to create an additional 300 jobs.
IG partner and former Assistant Administrator for Air at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Bill Rosenberg said, “The home-grown energy means that about $250 million a year will be spent in Indiana instead of leaving for some state or country that drills for natural gas.”
The USD$2.8 billion plant will provide about 17% of Indiana’s residential and commercial natural gas requirements and demonstrates that clean coal technology is a possibility. The plant will not burn coal, instead the gasification process will convert an estimated 10,000 tons of coal per day into substitute natural gas (SNG) and liquefied carbon dioxide (CO2). As the plant will gasify coal, it will achieve much lower air emissions than traditional coal-fired plants.
The IDEM permit is a recent regulatory endorsement for the project. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) filed an amended notice of intent to include the CO2 pipeline in the project’s loan guarantee financing and environmental impact statement earlier in June and and IDEM issued a draft Clean Water Act permit for the Rockport plant.
About 80% of the facility’s SNG output will be sold to the Indiana Finance Authority under an agreement that protects Indiana ratepayers. The CO2 produced will be compressed, sold and shipped by pipeline to oil-producing states.