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Durham's NET Power breaks ground on zero - emissions plant By John Murawski jirrnaAirawsCkli@irhe 1 seirveir. irmn This artist's rendering shows an experimental non - polluting power plant designed by Durham -based NET Power. The 25 megawatt facility is under construction Texas and is expected to start generating electricity for the Texas power grid in the first quarter of 2017. NET Power A Durham energy company's $140 - million quest to create the world's first zero - emissions power plant is advancing from the laboratory to the real world. NET Power broke ground last month on an experimental power plant near Houston, Texas, and expects to start generating electricity there in March 2017. Some are predicting that if IIVE IC' IP eir's experiment works and produces power without polluting, scores of these futuristic energy projects would sprout in the coming years in the U.S. and around the world. "This is no longer vaporware," NET Power chief executive Bill Brown said of the Texas project. "We have invented something that might save the planet." Among the pollutants the power plant is designed to block: carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that's blamed for global climate change. Instead of releasing CO2 into the atmosphere, the NET Power plant would capture carbon dioxide and store it for permanent injection underground or for industrial applications. NET Power's plant would be so clean it would not require a smokestack. The ultimate selling point is that NET Power's technology would cost about the same to build as a conventional power plant, thus obliterating the principal obstacle to pollution -free energy. Brown said that a number of U.S. utilities have expressed interest in building a full -scale version of the plant if the 25- megawatt trial version succeeds in Texas. Brown, who spent years financing deals on Wall Street, is also co- founder of 8 Rveirs Caplita , the Durham technology commercialization firm behind NET Power. Even if the project proved to be an engineering miracle, however, the NET Power plant would not please everyone. For one thing, it is designed to burn natural gas. The dependence on a fossil fuel, typically extracted by means of fracking, automatically renders NET Power's "zero- emissions" claim a non - starter for some environmental advocates. Additionally, NET Power intends to make its excess carbon dioxide available to energy companies for use in dislodging crude oil from subterranean geologic formations, a key step in advanced oil recovery. So the technology would either benefit from gas drilling or it would promote oil drilling.