Big Summit milestone checked off list
The search for an electricity customer for the Summit Texas Clean Power Energy project is over.
Summit will sell the electricity produced by the planned coal-gasification plant, which is expected to break ground later this year or early next year.
The customer, CPS Energy located in San Antonio, is the country’s largest municipally owned natural gas and electric utility. It provides service to about 717,000 electric customers and 325,000 natural gas customers near the city of San Antonio, a news release stated.
“This is the last big off-take agreement we needed to go to financial closing,” Laura Miller, Director of Projects for Texas, said. “This is a really big milestone for the project and for Odessa.”
Summit officials have said up to 2,000 people will be employed during the plant construction which, is expected to be completed in late 2014 or early 2015.
“We’re glad they found an electricity customer,” Guy Andrews, economic development director for the Odessa Chamber of Commerce.
The 400-megawatt plant is designed to capture 90 percent of the carbon dioxide it produces. Summit plans to sell the CO2 as enhanced oil-recovery, which will help companies bring more oil out of the ground. The plant will also produce and sell electricity and fertilizer. The financing for the $2.2 billion plant is expected to close in September, following the Department of Energy’s decision on whether to fund more than a quarter of the cost based on an environmental impact study.
The agreement with CPS Energy is for 25 years, the news release stated. The customer relations office for The Summit Project will be in San Antonio. Summit will partner in research with the Texas Sustainable Energy Research Institute at the University of Texas at San Antonio and host its National Carbon Management Advisory Board in San Antonio, the news release stated.
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