Experience in Developing the Goldeneye Storage Permit Application

Abstract

The Peterhead CCS project was expected to be the first full chain gas CCS project in the world. It planned to capture 1 Mtpa from the Peterhead CCGT power station on the north east coast of Scotland and store the CO2 offshore, reusing existing infrastructure from the depleted Goldeneye gas field. The project was very advanced when cancelled and had submitted the Storage Permit Application to the UK regulatory authorities who had sent it on to the European Commission for their review.The development of the permit was facilitated by a collaborative approach to working alongside the UK Regulator. An additional verification step was included in the form of an Independent External Review from the British Geological Survey (BGS) and Herriot Watt University (HWU).The EU commission provided an opinion that the permit fulfilled the requirements of the CCS directive, as long as two changes were made to the Environmental Statement and the period over which financial security was calculated. This positive result indicated that the final application was good, however, the project team feels that they could have been more effective in some areas of its development. Two areas of improvement were: the process of developing the financial security provision, which took longer than expected; and being more effective in working with multiple regulator teams in order to address the integrated containment assessment and monitoring plans required for CO2 storage under the UK regulations and the EU directive.All in all the process of developing a Storage Permit Application under the UK transposition of the EU directive was found to be moderately straight forward and the close collaboration with the regulator added significant value. If the project team were to start again knowing what they know now it would have been possible to focus the technical work earlier on the requirements of Storage Permit award conditions. It is hoped that by sharing the Goldeneye experience that other projects can soon follow suit.