Abstract
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities coupled to power plants provide a climate change mitigation strategy that potentially permits the continued use of fossil fuels whilst reducing the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. This process involves three basic stages: capture and compression of CO2 from power stations, transport of CO2, and storage away from the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years. Potential routes for the capture, transport and storage of CO2 from United Kingdom (UK) power plants are examined. Six indicative options are evaluated, based on ‘Pulverised Coal’, ‘Natural Gas Combined Cycle’, and ‘Integrated (coal) Gasification Combined Cycle’ power stations. Chemical and physical CO2 absorption capture techniques are employed with realistic transport possibilities to ‘Enhanced Oil Recovery’ sites or depleted gas fields in the North Sea. The selected options are quantitatively assessed against well-established economic and energy-related criteria. Results show that CO2 capture can reduce emissions by over 90%. However, this will reduce the efficiency of the power plants concerned, incurring energy penalties between 14 and 30% compared to reference plants without capture. Costs of capture, transport and storage are concatenated to show that the whole CCS chain ‘cost of electricity’ (COE) rises by 27–142% depending on the option adopted. This is a significant cost increase, although calculations show that the average ‘cost of CO2 captured’ is £15/tCO2 in 2005 prices [the current base year for official UK producer price indices]. If potential governmental carbon penalties were introduced at this level, then the COE would equate to the same as the reference plant, and make CCS a viable option to help mitigate large-scale climate change.
Highlights
Energy sources of various kinds heat and power human development, and put at risk the quality and longer-term viability of the biosphere as a result of unwanted, 'second order' effects [1]
More development is required in these cases to simulate options and determine whether the CO2 will be held over hundreds to thousands of years in order to mitigate climate change
The displacement of methane by injected CO2 in coal seams that cannot readily be mined is another geological option. This has the advantage of storing CO2, whilst retrieving economically valuable methane. It is still in the demonstration phase and, even though its storage capacity is relatively low, it could play a part in large-scale Carbon capture and storage (CCS) if the economics can be accurately determined; currently there is a wide range of estimated costs associated with Enhanced Coal-bed Methane (ECBM)
Summary
'residence time' in the atmosphere of around one hundred years. CO2 accounts for some 80% of the total GHG emissions in the United Kingdom (UK), and the energy sector is responsible for around 95% of these [1]. In the UK it is projected that present strategies to combat global warming will reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to close to the ‘domestic’ target of a 20% fall by 2010 compared with the 1990 levels [1,4]. This increase is dominated mainly by a rise of some 25% in carbon emissions in the transport sector compared over 1990 levels For this reason, electric vehicles may be a potentially attractive option in the future, provided that the associated power networks are decarbonised. IGCC plants lead to both relatively high thermal efficiencies (greater than 50%) and a reduction of CO2 of better than 20% compared to conventional plant [1] This range of cleaner coal systems provides the possibility of a transitional technological pathway out to a period when humanity can (hopefully) rely on low or zero carbon energy systems. The focus in the present work has been on the UK context, the findings have much broader implications for the adoption of clean power technologies in an international perspective
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