For people worried about global warming, it's one of the Holy Grails: Figuring out how to affordably take greenhouse gases and permanently store them underground. Now, a small Northwest company says it will do just that in a coal-fueled power plant it wants to build near the banks of the Columbia River in Southeast Washington.
--Seattle Times Story, July 5th, 2007

Wallula Energy Resource Center

A 21st Century Energy Resource in the Heart of the Pacific Northwest.

The Project's highly efficient operation and carbon sequestration program will enable it to generate approximately 914 megawatts of electricity with very low CO₂ emissions that meet or beat standards recently mandated by West Coast state governments.

The Wallula Energy Resource Center is a joint venture of Wallula Resource Recovery, LLC and Edison Mission Group in cooperation with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. and Fluor Enterprises, Inc.

Basalt + CO2 = clean coal? Let's hope so

Coal-burning power plants would not seem to have a bright future in a world worried about global warming.

In terms of climate change, they are a horror story, each plant dumping millions of tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each. But if coal could be burned relatively cleanly, the industry's carbon emissions could conceivably be reduced by hundreds of millions of tons a year.

That's what makes the Wallula Energy Resource Center Ð a consortium led by a Gig Harbor company, United Power Ð so intriguing. Its goal is to make coal a much cleaner energy resource by extracting most of its carbon dioxide, compressing it into a liquid and pumping it into the deep, vast basalt formations underlying much of Eastern Washington...

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