The Navajo Transitional Energy Company announced a partnership with a North Carolina-based business known as 8 Rivers to look into the feasibility of a coal-fired power plant in either the Powder River Basin of Wyoming or on the Navajo Nation that would be equipped with carbon capture technology.
8 Rivers is developing Allam-Fetvedt Cycle technology and direct-fired supercritical carbon dioxide turbines, which the firm says can eliminate emissions from coal-fired power plants while also producing pipeline-ready carbon dioxide. 8 Rivers is developing this technology in conjunction with Siemens Energy.
NTEC, which is a tribal enterprise of the Navajo Nation, owns the Navajo Mine west of Farmington and several coal mines in the Powder River Basin. It is also a partial owner of the Four Corners Power Plant and has attempted to acquire more ownership shares in the past. Under the agreement with 8 Rivers, the Allam-Fetvedt Cycle technology could be deployed in stages and the ultimate goal would be to provide up to 1,000 megawatts of generation using coal mined at one of the sites NTEC owns.
That could be the Navajo Mine site, which 8 Rivers said in a press release has the advantage of being strategically located near existing transmission infrastructure. This is because the mine is directly next to the Four Corners Power Plant and the owners of the power plant, including Arizona Public Service Company and the Public Service Company of New Mexico, needed to move electricity generated at the Four Corners plant to customers in places like Albuquerque and Phoenix, Arizona.
NTEC also has the Navajo Park Electrical Switching Station in the area. These assets would reduce or eliminate the time NTEC and 8 Rivers would face in connecting the proposed power plant to the grid and moving the electricity to the market because it would not require new transmission infrastructure to be built. However, there are other projects also eying that transmission infrastructure.
The Four Corners Power Plant is currently scheduled to close in 2031.
The agreement announced this week builds upon a past partnership between the two entities. In 2024, 8 Rivers and NTEC signed a memorandum of understanding “to jointly seek opportunities to develop and market new decarbonized power production projects using AFC technology that can be used as an anchor for further business development opportunities,” according to a press release.
In the press release, NTEC Chief Executive Officer Vern Lund said the partnership lines up with the company’s commitment “to the continued operation of the Four Corners Power Plant and Navajo Mine in order to preserve their irreplaceable economic contributions to the Navajo Nation.”
NTEC received $6.5 million in funding last year from the U.S. Department of Energy to pay for a front-end engineering design study that would evaluate retrofitting the Four Corners Power Plant with carbon capture technology.
The Four Corners Power Plant is located on Navajo Nation lands across the San Juan River from the San Juan Generating Station. A past attempt by the City of Farmington and the company Enchant Energy to retrofit the San Juan Generating Station with carbon capture technology failed and the San Juan Generating Station is being demolished.