Net Power, the U.S. company that spent years promising a gas plant with almost no carbon emissions, is now buying reciprocating engines. Heatmap reported on 22 October that the company has acquired ten natural gas engines and plans to put them next to a data center on the site it had kept for its first commercial plant. Net Power declined to comment to the reporter, and no data center customer has been named.
What Net Power Actually Bought
The paperwork is in the company's own disclosure, which TipRanks summarized in early September. On 31 August Net Power closed the purchase of a contract position from EMPower USA: an engineering, procurement and construction agreement with Saulsbury Industries for a 123 MW reciprocating-engine plant, together with the rights under EMPower's supply contract with Wärtsilä North America for ten engine-generator sets. These are contract rights, not a running business. Net Power paid EMPower about $58.9 million in cash and took over roughly $177.8 million of remaining payments under the $196.7 million construction contract, including a $58.6 million milestone payment at closing. A further $10.2 million mobilization payment was due by 15 October. The money came from cash on hand.
Saulsbury agreed to move the project from Ector County, Texas, to Net Power's Project Permian site, and Wärtsilä acknowledged Net Power as the owner. Work has been on hold since 1 July and restarts only after a full notice to proceed, an agreed relocation and schedule change, and the mobilization payment. With these engines the first phase of Project Permian could reach nearly 200 MW. The filing is just as clear about what is missing: no final investment decision, no buyer for the power, and permits, site access, grid connection, gas supply and more financing still to come.
From Oxy-Combustion To Engine Halls
Heatmap sets the change against the company's history. Net Power went public in 2023 with an oxy-combustion design meant to emit little or no carbon. Its first-of-a-kind plant was estimated at $1.7 billion for 200 MW and has been dropped. The article has the chief executive saying that speed is what counts in power and data centers right now, and an academic observing that demand for gas without capture is large while demand for capture is much smaller. Besides the Wärtsilä engines, the company has two 30 MW Siemens turbines ordered for delivery in 2028, the same report says. Heatmap does not say whether the ten engines it mentions are the ten sets in the Wärtsilä contract.
The piece also cites an Earthjustice estimate that a 1 GW reciprocating-engine plant would emit about one and a half times the yearly CO2 of a combined-cycle plant, and roughly twice the nitrogen oxides and fine particles. A Canadian capture-technology firm, Entropy, has signed a letter of intent to bring its post-combustion capture technology to the U.S.
What Ten Engines Ask Of A Site
For anyone who plans a plant like this, the order of events matters more than the headline: engines contracted for one site, a contractor moved to another, permits and a gas contract still open. A hall of ten large engines is also a heat question. Every set has to give up its jacket-water and charge-air heat to the outside air, and that is easier to settle before the engines are ordered than after the site has been fixed.
Earlier items on the same theme: Wärtsilä's 282 MW order for a U.S. data center, and our page on data centers.
Sources: Heatmap News, The Globe and Mail (TipRanks)
