The Center, located at the Power Systems Development Facility south of Birmingham in Alabama, is a partnership between the US Department of Energy (DOE) and leading energy companies.

The Center will conduct testing and analyses in a power plant setting, at a size large enough to provide meaningful performance data under real operating conditions to enable scale-up of the technologies.

The NCCC plans to test both pre-combustion and post-combustion carbon capture technologies.

Existing facilities will be modified to conduct the pre-combustion CO2 capture component of the NCCC project.

New facilities to conduct post-combustion testing and evaluation will be on the site of Plant Gaston, a coal-fueled generating plant adjacent to the PSDF operated by Southern Company subsidiary Alabama Power.

The plant is expected to be fully operational in 2010.

Other partners in the project include Southern Company, American Electric Power, Luminant and the Electric Power Research Institute among others.