More than coal - Towards a broader role for CCS

Abstract

Abstract In the eyes of energy analysts and bureaucrats as well as media and environmental NGO’s, CCS now appears to be synonymous with “clean coal”, meaning coal fired power plants with CCS. While recognising the role of coal–emitting nearly 42 percent of man-made CO 2 globally–we want to focus on other aspects of CCS that we find are just as, or more important in actually driving the deployment of CCS in the coming years. One of these factors is what we see as an evolving “industry norm” to inject, into geological formations, CO 2 extracted from high- CO 2 natural gas in gas refineries or LNG plants. A second trend driving CCS in the petroleum sector is the need to produce increasingly acid natural gas (CO 2 and/or H 2 S rich) and heavier oil. This will certainly accelerate the number of petroleum related CCS-projects in the next decades and thus be valuable for geo-storage learning. A third and already important factor is the use of CO 2 for enhanced oil recovery (CO 2 -EOR). Today CO 2 -EOR is mostly limited to USA - with nearly one hundred operating projects–and a small but increasing number in other countries. In the period to 2030 and beyond, it is the view of the authors that CO 2 -EOR will fan out across the sedimentary basins of the world. These three factors will not only add to our knowledge of geological storage of CO 2 , but also be important drivers to develop storage sites, pipeline networks, shipping routes and other infrastructure components for CO 2 . There are in fact some profitable CCS-projects or at least projects with modest needs for subsidies. With the present electricity-from-coal focus of CCS, it is easy to forget the potential role of other branches of industry with large point sources of CO 2 . The branches of iron and steel, cement, petrochemicals, refining, fertiliser, biomass-to-energy are examples we should focus more on. This lack of broad focus is regrettable for two reasons. Firstly, some of these are CO 2 sources which lend themselves to CCS by having higher CO 2 concentrations or higher pressures than power plant flue gas, resulting in potentially lower capture cost. Secondly we need these branches of industry to learn CCS-capture technologies from each other, to progress their own demo-projects and become familiar with the practices of geo-store companies. The main focus in this paper is learning geo-storage by taking available CO 2 -streams rather than creating such streams through billion dollar investment projects. One such example is that hydrogen today is largely produced and distributed by pipelines and other methods by a small group of specialised industrial gas companies. The connection between these companies and CO 2 -storage operators are, however, nearly non-existent. Hydrogen–except for pre-combustion to electricity - has been put on the back-burner in connection with CCS. We here argue for focussing more on hydrogen from fossil fuels with CCS aimed at end-use in industry.