FRANKFURT (Reuters) - German utility E.ON and industrial group Siemens said on Thursday they would build a pilot plant to capture carbon dioxide emissions from coal burning.
It is due to start operations in the summer, a joint statement said.
It will be built at E.ON's Staudinger power station near Hanau east of Frankfurt, and will be tested in a hard-coal fired unit, Staudinger's block 5.
"The two companies are thus pushing further ahead with the development of a process geared toward climate-compatible power generation," it said.
The move is in line with efforts around the globe to produce almost carbon-free power to help fight climate change caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels.
It coincides with the Berlin government ending months of wrangling to agree on Thursday on a draft law on carbon storage to give CCS developers planning security.
The draft lays down the conditions for CO2 storage activities and could be passed in parliament before the next general election in September.
E.ON and SIEMENS (SIE.XE) pilot plant would have a capacity of one megawatt (MW) and the investment was worth less than 10 million euros ($12.60 million), a spokeswoman for Siemens said, without giving further details.
It will be run with part of the flue gas from Staudinger's unit 5 between mid-2009 and the end of 2010. Commercial-size plants would have to have at least 400 MW capacity and one such venture is planned by RWE for 2014.
The process called carbon capture and storage (CCS), which supporters hope will safeguard coal and gas use to produce power while sparing the environment, needs testing before it can be deployed in large plants for full commercial use.
The two partners said out of a number of different procedures for CCS, they had opted for a type of so-called post-combustion-capture, which Siemens has developed. It entails removing CO2 with amino acid salt as a cleaning agent before gases are discharged into the atmosphere.
Operators elsewhere, including Vattenfall, experiment with so-called pre-combustion and oxyfuel processes.
Once CO2 is removed, it is buried in porous rocks underground.
Like sector peers, E.ON plans on using industrial-scale CCS starting in 2020, when the European Union requires coal plants to use the process if they want to continue to generate power.
E.ON's generation unit, E.ON Kraftwerke, operates 50 blocks of a total capacity of 14,000 megawatts. Under long-term investment programs, it currently aims for 20 new plants with a capacity totaling 15,000 MW.
(Reporting by Vera Eckert; editing by Sue Thomas)
