The need for urgent CCS investment has been established in order to meet the ambitious Paris Agreement targets. How far away are we from CCS becoming a common reality?
Each of the individual components of capture, transport and storage have been in operation already. For example, capture and removal of carbon dioxide from natural gas is already a common process in this industry (Rufford et al., 2012) through use of amines. Furthermore, transport and storage of carbon dioxide is already in use in the enhanced oil recovery industry, amongst others (IEA, 2010). The challenge is integrating each of these components on an industrial scale.
CCS has already been in operation in several countries, including Germany, Canada and the US. The first commercial example was the Weyburn-Midale Carbon Dioxide Project in Saskatchewan, Canada, which began construction in 2000. It began as a collaborative project between researchers to test the feasibility of the technology. As of 2008, it became the largest CCS plant in the world (IEA, 2010). Researchers found that after allegations of carbon dioxide leakage in 2011, it was determined that the detection was from naturally occurring biological processes instead (Green Car Congress press release, 2005; NRDC, 2012). So far, its implementation has been deemed successful, and it has been calculated that Weyburn-Midale will store carbon dioxide equivalent to removing about 9 million cars off the road for a year (PTRC, 2010).
Meanwhile, in Europe, the Schwarze Pumpe power station in eastern Germany (run by Swedish energy company Vattenfall) stopped its CCS project in 2014 because of significant costs of running the technology (thelocal.se, 2014).
On UK shores, two key CCS proposals that were in the pipeline to be built alongside current power stations (Peterhead and Drax) were halted when the government scrapped the funding for a CCS competition worth £1 billion in November 2015 (The Guardian, 2015). The integration of CCS into current power plant infrastructure is an expensive process, raised by the report published by the Climate Change Committee from the last post (CCC, 2016). The scrapping of this scheme has therefore significantly halted any progress of CCS being developed in the UK. This needs to change.
Costs of CCS vary depending on the site. For example, costs drastically increase if the distance of the CCS plant to the point source increases, or if there is a reduction in concentration or volume of carbon dioxide (IEA, 2013). It is the uncertainty of costs that is ultimately hindering development. How could the issue of cost be resolved to spark global implementation?
The International Energy Agency (2013) published a report recommending that governments commit public funds towards ten pilot schemes to help determine true physical and economic feasibility of different projects, including iron, steel and cement plants. To encourage government uptake, they further recommend the allocation of capital grants, subsidies and loans at the initial stages of development (see figure below), which then shifts to carbon taxation and credits in the latter stages once deployed on the wider-scale:
Possible gateways on the way to wide-scale deployment in a CCS policy framework (Source: IEA, 2012)
The technology exists. It is physically feasible. Money, once more, remains the barrier to progress.
Hello Martha.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting post - this is not something that was well known to me before reading this. I understand that removing and storing CO2 means that it is not in the atmosphere but are there any potential risks of storing CO2 in this way? It almost seems too good to be true!
Charlotte
There have been suggestions that CO2 could eventually leak from underground, altering oceanic pH if located under ocean basins. But this hasn't yet been formally observed with CCS projects currently in operation worldwide. Only time will tell!
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