The W.A. Parish Generating Station is a 3.65-gigawatt (3,653
MW), dual-fired power plant located near
Thompsons, Texas
Thompsons is a town in Fort Bend County, Texas, United States, within the Houston–Sugar Land–Baytown metropolitan area. The population was 156 at the 2020 census.
Geography
Thompsons is located south of the Brazos River in east-centr ...
. The station occupies a 4,664-acre site near
Smithers Lake
Smithers Lake is an artificial impoundment in Fort Bend County, Texas, collecting water from Dry Creek. It is located south of the Brazos River, southeast of Richmond, and is completely within the city limits of Thompsons.
The project is owned ...
southwest of
Houston
Houston ( ) is the List of cities in Texas by population, most populous city in the U.S. state of Texas and in the Southern United States. Located in Southeast Texas near Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, it is the county seat, seat of ...
in
Fort Bend County
Fort Bend County is a county located in the U.S. state of Texas. The county was founded on December 29, 1837, and organized the next year. It is named for a blockhouse at a bend of the Brazos River. The community developed around the fort in ...
and consists of two four-unit plants; one
natural gas
Natural gas (also fossil gas, methane gas, and gas) is a naturally occurring compound of gaseous hydrocarbons, primarily methane (95%), small amounts of higher alkanes, and traces of carbon dioxide and nitrogen, hydrogen sulfide and helium ...
and the other
coal
Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock, formed as rock strata called coal seams. Coal is mostly carbon with variable amounts of other Chemical element, elements, chiefly hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen.
Coal i ...
(2,697 MW).
With a total installed capacity of 3,653 MW, it is the second largest
conventional power station in the US, and supplies about fifteen percent of the energy in the Houston area.
NRG Energy
NRG Energy, Inc. is an American energy company, headquartered in Houston, Texas. It was formerly the wholesale arm of Northern States Power Company (NSP), which became Xcel Energy, but became independent in 2000. NRG Energy is involved in energ ...
owns and operates the plant.
The
Powder River Basin
The Powder River Basin is a geologic structural basin in southeast Montana and northeast Wyoming, about east to west and north to south, known for its extensive coal reserves. The former hunting grounds of the Oglala Lakota, the area is very ...
supplies three 115-car trainloads worth of low-sulfur coal to units 5-8 or 36,000 tons daily.
Completed in January 2017, the post-combustion
Petra Nova
Petra Nova is a Carbon capture and storage, carbon capture project designed to reduce carbon emissions from one of the boilers of a Fossil fuel power station, coal burning power plant in Thompsons, Texas. It is a multi-million dollar project take ...
Carbon Capture Project became largest installed on an existing power plant in the world. The system pumped 1.6 million tons of filtered
carbon dioxide
Carbon dioxide is a chemical compound with the chemical formula . It is made up of molecules that each have one carbon atom covalent bond, covalently double bonded to two oxygen atoms. It is found in a gas state at room temperature and at norma ...
() from unit 8 to the West Ranch Oil Field 82 miles away in
Jackson County. Since the system is powered by natural gas, it was originally expected to have a net effect of not releasing 785,000 tons of carbon annually. The system cost approximately $1 billion, but was idled from May 2020 to September 2023 due to the low price of oil during the
COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...
.
Adjacent to Parish Station is the natural gas Brazos Valley Power Plant owned by
Calpine Energy which opened in 2003.
Notable Incidents
During the
2021 Texas power crisis
In February 2021, the state of Texas suffered a major Energy crisis, power crisis, which came about during three severe winter storms sweeping across the United States on February 2021 North American ice storm, February 10–11, February 13†...
, Parish Station was reported to have experienced up to a 664 MW loss in generation capacity, including an 80 MW decrease in capacity early in the crisis that contributed to the need for rolling blackouts.
The Unit 8 turbine, which has a generating capacity of 610 MW, caught fire the night of May 8, 2022. While there were no injuries reported during the fire, a chemical exposure incident during the repairs briefly hospitalized six workers. The turbine was heavily damaged and remained offline as of August 2023. Unit 8 was originally expected to be repaired by May 7, 2023.
See also
*
List of largest power stations in the United States
This article lists the largest List of power stations in the United States, electricity generating stations in the United States in terms of installed Nameplate capacity, electrical capacity. Non-renewable resource, Non-renewable power stations ar ...
*
List of power stations in Texas
This is a list of electricity-generating power stations in the U.S. state of Texas, sorted by type and name. In 2022, Texas had a total summer capacity of 148,900 MW through all of its power plants, and a net generation of 525,562 GWh ...
References
External links
{{Commons category, W. A. Parish Power Plant, WA Parish Generating Station
Coal-fired power stations in Texas
Buildings and structures in Fort Bend County, Texas
Natural gas-fired power stations in Texas
NRG Energy