The carbon capture and storage-equipped portion of the coal-fired Petra Nova power station in Texas has been restarted after a three-year hiatus, as announced by its owner, JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration Corporation.

The CCS facility is a retrofit to the power station (which began operation in 1977), and was commissioned in January 2017, when it was jointly owned by JX Nippon and NRG Energy Inc. As the captured carbon dioxide was used for enhanced oil recovery to make running the facility economic, when the oil price crashed (along with a decline in power prices) with the onset of the covid pandemic, in May 2020 the plant was shut down.

Last year, NRG Energy sold its 50% stake in the project to JX Nippon for around US$3.6 million, a tiny fraction of the approximately US$1 billion spent to install the CCS facility (to which the US Department of Energy had contributed US$195 million). With the incentives available in the Inflation Reduction Act and high oil prices, JX Nippon restarted the plant on 5 September, citing its commitment to achieving carbon neutrality “of its emissions” by 2040.

As Reuters reported in August, the restart of the plant was delayed for several months this year, as NRG Energy, which still operates the coal-fired unit that has the CCS facility applied to it, made “several adjustments”. The CCS plant had a mixed record during the three years of its operation, not meeting its capture or uptime targets, but achieving reasonable capture rates for an early-stage facility.

Whether operation is more efficient during the current operational phase will be highly interesting, should data be released.