Hillsborough leaders may soon vote on carbon capture proposal. What’s in it?
County staff are “cautiously optimistic” about the emerging technology that environmentalists have called a scam. Hillsborough County commissioners may vote on a carbon capture pilot program, which aims to keep carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The South Korean company, LowCarbon, is proposing to capture carbon dioxide produced at the county’s waste-to-energy plant in Hillsborough and convert it into calcium carbonate, which the company claims is a profitable byproduct. If approved, the pilot program will operate for two months before it can be fully operated. However, county guidelines prohibit pilot programs from extending past 6 months. The company had previously pledged $100 million to a Polk County hydrogen production plant, and signed a memorandum of understanding with the company to develop a hydrogen research hub in the state.
Published : 4 weeks ago by Jack Prator in Environment
When Hillsborough County commissioners met in January to discuss a carbon capture pilot program, environmental advocates railed against the proposal. They were shocked by how little information was available to the public and were skeptical of big claims made by the South Korean company peddling this technology.
Records obtained by the Tampa Bay Times show representatives from the company and county staff went back and forth multiple times since August, negotiating the terms of a draft agreement.
County public works staff will brief commissioners on their findings Wednesday. They are poised to recommend greenlighting the program, according to a staff report shared with the Times ahead of the meeting.
Carbon capture is an emerging technology that aims to keep carbon dioxide — a common greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming — out of the atmosphere. Popularized recently as a solution to climate change, carbon capture is riding a wave of government incentives and lobbying from fossil fuel companies.
There are a variety of methods used in trapping carbon dioxide and even more uses for it. LowCarbon, the company proposing the Hillsborough facility, pledged $100 million to a Polk County hydrogen production plant that broke ground last year.
In April 2023, Gov. Ron DeSantis threw his support behind LowCarbon and signed a memorandum of understanding with the company to develop a hydrogen research hub in the state.
In Hillsborough, LowCarbon is proposing to capture carbon dioxide produced at the county’s waste-to-energy plant in Brandon and convert it into calcium carbonate, which the company claims is a profitable byproduct.
A company representative could not be reached by phone and two messages submitted through their website on Monday and Tuesday went unanswered.
When Hillsborough County staff first received the proposal from LowCarbon, they had very little to go on, said county public utilities administrator George Cassady.
“It didn’t have a significant amount of detail to it,” Cassady said. “It just really kind of presented the technology in a big picture format.”
In August, LowCarbon had asked the county to fully commit to a permanent facility on the condition that the pilot delivered on its promise of capturing one ton of carbon each day, records show.
“We just absolutely don’t do that,” Cassady said. “We will be the sole determiner of what happens after the pilot.”
LowCarbon estimated the cost of a scaled-up, permanent facility at more than $24 million, which it proposed the county alone would bear.
Cassady said county staff has not promised the company anything but a shot to prove their technology works.
“We’re going a step at a time,” he said. “There’s not any financial exposure to us for this pilot. It’s all on the shoulders of the LowCarbon company. They are footing the bill.”
How will it work?
If approved, LowCarbon will have two months to operate its pilot facility at an existing waste-to-energy plant in Brandon. If the county decides to move forward with a larger, permanent carbon capture facility, it will open bids to the company and others like it.
Cassady says there are two main draws to the technology that LowCarbon offers.
“The benefit is we’re pulling carbon dioxide that would otherwise be going into the atmosphere, and then we’re converting it to a commodity that can be used in manufacturing,” he said. “So that seems to be a good driver for us.”
In its initial proposal, LowCarbon asked that the pilot program run for one year, but county guidelines prohibit pilot programs approved by the board to extend past 6 months.
Instead, Cassady said a 60-day period will be recommended to commissioners, which would give the company enough time to showcase its technology.
It will also give the county enough time to answer lingering questions about the facility.
“Does the thing run well? Does it run continuously? Are there any problems with it? Does it indeed produce the byproducts that they claim it’ll produce?” Cassady said. “And what, ultimately, is the benefit?”
Cassady said the county doesn’t yet know how valuable the calcium carbonate byproduct is.
“One of the things that we’re going to be evaluating is what’s the purity of the calcium carbonate. What kind of market value does it have?” he said. “Is it going to be worth $100 a ton? $1,000 a ton?”
During the pilot phase, LowCarbon would sell the calcium carbonate generated and give that information to the county to assess.
Like many carbon capture systems on the market, LowCarbon’s technology relies on already existing infrastructure in Hillsborough County.
Household trash collected by the county is taken to either a landfill or to the Hillsborough County Resource Recovery Facility, a waste-to-energy plant that burns garbage to create steam that drives a turbine to make electricity.
The facility processes more than 520,000 tons of waste each year that would otherwise end up in landfills, offsetting carbon dioxide emissions by 370,000 metric tons, according to Covanta, the company that operates the plant.
It’s the equivalent of taking 79,000 passenger vehicles off the road for one year, by Covanta’s estimations. But the process is far from carbon neutral.
“As you can imagine you’re burning all this trash and there’s an exhaust associated with it,” Cassady said. “The exhaust has a lot of CO2 in it.”
LowCarbon’s pilot facility would trap just one ton of carbon dioxide daily — a fraction of the approximate 600 tons emitted every day by the trash-burning plant.
In a revised proposal submitted by LowCarbon on Mar. 28, the company stated it would propose a permanent facility that could capture 100 to 400 tons of carbon. But scaling up could be an issue, county officials and environmentalists say.
Cassady has worked in the county’s water and public utilities departments for more than a decade. He says the county is approached often by companies with requests for pilot programs to showcase their innovative technology.
He’s seen businesses struggle to scale up their small, laboratory process to be made viable in real world conditions. One pilot greenlit by the county didn’t last more than a day before it was deemed a failure due to a breakdown of vital equipment.
Still, he’s hopeful LowCarbon can make good on its promises.
“Without saying I’m skeptical, let me just say I am cautiously optimistic that it will work,” Cassady said.
What are environmental advocates saying?
Both the county and LowCarbon do not anticipate any air quality violations or harmful environmental impacts resulting from the facility, records state.
Oakley Shelton-Thomas, a researcher with Food & Water Watch, said the company’s technology could act very differently in a scaled-up facility, making it impossible to rule out any issues or spills that could have an adverse effect on nearby land and air.
He said it’s not clear how much it would cost to scale the facility up to capture all 600 tons of carbon dioxide emitted by the Covanta waste plant, but the $24 million price tag suggests it won’t be cheap.
“It’s clearly out of step with the cost to address those emissions in other ways,” Shelton-Thomas said.
Brooke Ward, the senior Florida organizer with Food & Water Watch, said she’d rather see the county support a transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources. She worries that a permanent plant built at the county’s expense would divert funds away from any future efforts to do so.
“It also avoids talking about real solutions,” she said. “And that’s what we need right now.”
Ward has characterized carbon capture as an “industry scam” and said there’s a “big if” concerning whether LowCarbon will deliver on its promises.
Even if the technology is as good as the company purports, she said it’s still too expensive to be a viable solution to lower greenhouse gas emissions.
“It’s a huge amount of taxpayer dollars going toward a project that will not even make a dent in the amount of carbon being released in Hillsborough County,” she said. “It’s a sideshow and a distraction.”
Topics: Carbon Capture