Clean, Cheap Energy in Fort Bend County?

Energy is big business in Houston, but how we often produce it — burning coal or oil — is dirty business. So it's great to hear about local companies investing money in new, cleaner power-producing technologies, especially when their success is far from a sure bet.

Thursday Hunton Energy announced plans to build a power plant south of Sugarland that will use two separate approaches to keep greenhouse gases out of the air. First, they will convert oil-refining byproducts into a cleaner-burning gas. Second, after they burn the fuel, they will capture the carbon dioxide instead of releasing it into the air in a process called carbon sequestration.

Three points of interest:

• TXU says that turning the refining byproducts into gas isn't practical. And no one, including the U.S. Department of Energy, is sure if carbon sequestration will work without more research; it's never been done on the scale they're proposing.


• Hunton Energy says that if it works, even with all of the pollution prevention technology, the power they produce will be cheaper than that produced at coal plants, the reigning champion of cheap power. Compare this to wind and solar, whose environmental benefits come at a high cost per kilowatt hour.


• This plan apparently has some environmental street cred - Public Citizen, Ralph Nader's organization, is supporting it, and they're not a traditional friend of industry.

In related news, State Representative Ana Hernandez of Houston introduced a bill that would give the Texas Commission for Environmental Quality more authority to regulate air quality in Texas. It's unclear how much of a chance this bill has.

--
Photo: flickr user Micah A. Ponce