Post-combustion carbon capture imposes a 25-30% parasitic load on power plants

Retrofitting a coal or gas power plant with amine-based post-combustion carbon capture reduces net electrical output by 25-30% for coal plants and 10-15% for gas plants. Approximately two-thirds of this penalty comes from the thermal energy needed to regenerate the amine solvent (heating it to ~120C to release captured CO2), and the remaining third from compressing captured CO2 to pipeline pressure (~2,200 psi). This means a 500 MW coal plant effectively becomes a 350 MW plant after capture is installed. The operator must either burn ~30% more fuel to maintain the same output (increasing fuel costs and upstream emissions) or sell less electricity (reducing revenue). Either way, the economics are devastating for operators in competitive wholesale power markets where margins are already thin. So what? This energy penalty is the core reason why, despite decades of R&D and billions in subsidies, only a handful of power plants worldwide operate CCS -- and several (like Petra Nova in Texas and Boundary Dam in Saskatchewan) have shut down or drastically underperformed. The problem persists because the thermodynamics of separating CO2 from nitrogen at low concentrations (~12-15% in flue gas) impose fundamental minimum energy requirements, and current commercial solvents operate only marginally above this theoretical floor.