California may be pioneering a lower greenhouse gas footprint, but if it’s engineered though fossil fuel-to-hydrogen fuel including carbon sequestration, then it will be an expensive journey, according to witnesses at a May 29 California Energy Commission workshop on coal power. “Basically here’s what it costs and it costs more” than other sources of power, said Larry Kostrzewa, managing director of development, Carson Hydrogen Power. Carson is a proposed petroleum coke-to-hydrogen plant sponsored by BP and Edison Mission Energy. About one-third of the carbon dioxide created by the process is set to be sequestered by injection into oil fields to loosen up deposits for enhanced oil recovery. Kostrzewa added that until there is a price on CO2 so that the sequestered gas has a value to the company, the price of the power from the new plant will be 11 cents/kWh. “With a price on CO2, that will fill in the missing money” to peg it at a more marketable price. Federally financed FutureGen--using a coal-to-gas process and then carbon sequestration--also expects the resulting gas not to have an economic value, according to Mike Mudd, FutureGen Alliance chief executive director. That project, subsidized by $1 billion, is expected to be the first commercial scale zero-emissions coal plant. The expected capacity is 275 MW, according to Mudd. FutureGen is expected to be built in Texas or Illinois. Meanwhile, the U.S. Geological Service is scoping out the California landscape to find potential sequestration sites, said Larry Myer, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab technical director. “You can’t just stick in a straw anywhere and expect it to store CO2,” Myer said. He expects that pilot projects can inject up to 2,000 tons of carbon dioxide at 3,400 feet--about two-thirds of a mile--below ground. He added that it can probably be accomplished for a cost of $40/ton. In addition to injections in oil deposits for enhanced oil recovery, Myer noted that the USGS is also looking into injection into saline deposits. In another potentially productive use, carbon dioxide can be bled off without injection and used in manufacturing. Freezing chickens, making soda pop, and manufacturing baking soda are three primary uses, according to Stu Dalton, Electric Power Research Institute generation director. However, the demand for carbon dioxide for those uses is paltry versus emissions--about 8 million tons/year, according to John Kadyszewski, Winrock International coordinator of ecosystems services. Estimates assume there are about 1.5 billion tons of carbon emissions in the U.S. annually.