AEP's Commitment to Commercial-Scale CCS Unaffected by Negative Ruling from Virginia Regulators

SUGAR LAND--September 28, 2010--Written by John Egan for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Despite a recent negative ruling from Virginia state utility regulators, American Electric Power (NYSE:AEP) (Columbus, Ohio) remains committed to constructing a commercial-scale carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) project at the company's Mountaineer Power Station in West Virginia. On July 15, the Virginia Corporation Commission (VCC) denied the request by AEP subsidiary Appalachian Power Company (Roanoke, Virginia) to recover and earn a return on its investment in a CCS technology-validation project at Mountaineer. The validation project is capturing, chilling, and injecting carbon dioxide emissions from a 20-megawatt (MW) slipstream of flue gas at Mountaineer, a 1,300-MW power plant in New Haven, West Virginia.