CLECO ANNOUNCEMENT- Louisiana Electric Power Company CLECO announced yesterday that it will invest $900 million in a carbon sequestration project that will capture and store underground most of the carbon emitted from its largest electricity plant in Rapides Parish. CLECO, a monopoly regulated by the Louisiana Public Service Commission serves 291,000 electricity customers in 24 Louisiana parishes. The project is called “Diamond Vault” and it is designed to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions in a geological formation under the Madison-3 electricity plant at Brame Energy Center in central Louisiana. Bill Conway, CLECO Chief Compliance Officer and General Counsel explained how the process will work.
“Diamond Vault will install equipment that uses a chemical process to capture 95% of Madison-3’s Co2,” Conway said. “It will compress the Co2 and then inject it into deep geological formations where it will be permanently stored and bond with the surrounding rock over time.”
The MAD-3 plant in Rapides Parish is the largest single emitter of Carbon Dioxide emissions among power plants in Louisiana producing about 3 to 4 million tons of Co2 per year. The Diamond Vault project will create about 40 new permanent jobs and 1,600 construction jobs in Central Louisiana. And continues to advance the state as one of the world's largest carbon capture hubs which CLECO says may attract third-party carbon-capture customers. Construction is expected to begin in 2025 and become operational in 2028.
