Development of an Integrated Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage Hub in the United States

Abstract

The Integrated Midcontinent Stacked Carbon Storage Hub (IMSCS-HUB) is a first of a kind carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) project in the midwestern United States. The project is supported under the US Department of Energy’s Carbon Storage Assurance Facility Enterprise (CarbonSAFE) program. The IMSCS-HUB will collect 15 million metric tonnes (MT) per year or more in Iowa and Nebraska and transport it to saline and CO2 enhanced oil recovery (EOR) storage sites in western Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas. Sources include multiple ethanol plants (approximately 1.8 MT/Year), coal fired electric plants (approximately 12.6 MT/Year), and natural gas fired electric plants (approximately 0.6 MT/Year). The passage of an updated tax credit for storage in February 2018 provides a strong economic driver for all of the sources in the hub to develop a hub project. The tax credit provides approximately $50/T for CO2 stored in saline storage units and $35/T for CO2 stored as part of CO2-EOR production. In addition, the inclusion of many bio-energy sources such as ethanol plants allows for early implementation of the project by taking advantage of inexpensive capture ($10/MT to $12/MT) and subsidies from California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard program. Capture cost estimates for the electric utilities is approximately $33/MT. Transport costs range from $0.6/MT to $5.40/MT. Storage costs range from $3/MT to $4/MT. The hub partners include Battelle, Advanced Resources International, Archer Daniels Midland, Nebraska Public Power District, and others. The region of the project stretching from eastern Iowa to southwestern Nebraska acts as a source corridor, where sources add CO2 to the transport network. The transportation network will consist of a common carrier trunk line designed to connect the largest sources. Smaller sources will be connected through spur lines. The final routing will be selected using the location of existing rights away and environmental factors such as resource locations the critical species habitats. SimCCS and other tools will be used to finalize the routes. The region of the project from southwestern Nebraska to southwest Kansas in a storage corridor where CO2 may be stored in either saline projects or CO2-EOR projects. South of Kansas the CO2 will be transported to Texas for utilization in CO2-EOR. Two saline storage sites and two EOR opportunities have been identified as anchor projects for the storage corridor. The anchor sites are at the northern and southern sides of the storage corridor and will act to validate the storage potential of the entire corridor. In Nebraska saline storage is being planned in Perkins county and CO2-EOR is being studied at Sleepy Hollow Field in Red Willow county. In Kansas, saline storage and CO2- EOR are being planned for Patterson-Heinitz-Hartland (Patterson) Field in Kearney County. Multiple storage formations occur vertically at each site allowing for stacked storage minimizing the surface footprint for monitoring and maximizes the use of storage resources at each site. Data from new tests wells or seismic surveys for each of the sites has been used to create detailed geologic and reservoir models. Modeling for each of the anchor saline sites indicates at least a 50 million tonne storage capacity. The CO2-EOR projects are expected to utilize 2.2 MT and 3.9 MT of CO2 and produce 4.3 and 9.8 million barrels of oil for Sleepy Hollow and Patterson Fields, respectively. The inclusion of CO2-EOR along with saline storage adds an additional economic driver for the project with an estimated revenue of $128/MT and $154/MT of CO2 utilized. The results of the first two phases of the project demonstrate the feasibility of the midcontinent hub concept that couples a diverse set of redundant sources to multiple saline and CO2-EOR projects. The results show that the economics and geology are favorable for early implementation of commercial scale CCUS. The existence of low carbon fuel standard subsidies, storage tax credits, and revenue from produced oil act as economic drivers to support the hub in addition to the climate benefit gained by storing CO2 the hub supports local agriculture and oil production helping to create public support. This presentation will discuss the project development and project economics and how they relate to both stacked saline storage and CO2-EOR in the development of a storage hub. The development of a hub project allows the transport of CO2 from areas such as Iowa that have poor storage potential to areas such as western Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas that have high storage potential. This is critical to the implementation of CCUS in the midcontinent US. The presentation will also discuss the advantage of including redundant sources and sinks to develop a CO2 market that can sustain itself as a commercial enterprise after government funding ends.