(Bloomberg) --Energean Plc submitted a proposal to the Greek government to build a carbon dioxide storage facility and a hydrogen plant in northern Greece close to its old Prinos oil field.
The project would be the first of its kind in the Mediterranean, Chief Executive Officer Matthaios Rigas said at a conference Wednesday, without providing further details. Capital expenditure for the project is close to $500 million and, if approved, the project will be funded by the European Union’s recovery and resilience facility, a person familiar with the plan said, asking not to be identified as the details are private.
Energean, listed in London, declined to provide further details.
EC recognises need for CCS in its Energy Union Strategy
On 25 February 2015 the EU adopted its Communication for an Energy Union, setting out a strategy for the establishment of a resilient Energy Union with a forward-looking climate change policy. The Communication features an annexed action plan listing fifteen ‘action points’ for the coming years, including electricity market legislation, enhanced regional cooperation and increasing funding for low-carbon technologies. Bellona welcomes in particular the explicit reference to the need for enhanced support to Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology in meeting climate change objectives, and calls for these words to be matched by concrete actions, for instance through meaningful reform of the ETS and its related funding mechanisms for CCS.
The recently released Communication of the EC sets out that the Energy Union will adopt a number of inter-related policies, among which will be new pieces of legislation with the ambition to secure supplies of electricity and gas as well as increased funding channeled towards energy efficiency and renewable energy generation.
The Strategy notes that if Europe’s Energy Union is to be the world number one in renewable energies, it must lead on the next generation of renewable technologies as well as to energy storage solutions. The Communication seeks the establishment of a new Research and Innovation (R&I) strategy. This new European energy R&I approach will seek to accelerate energy system transformation.
The Energy Union Communication highlights the importance of a forward-looking approach to CCS and Carbon Capture and Use (CCU) for the power and industrial sectors, arguing that it will be critical in reaching the 2050 climate objectives in a cost-effective way. The text acknowledges that the deployment of this key technology will necessitate the creation of an enabling policy framework. This in turn will require a comprehensive reform of the EU Emission Trading System (ETS) and the implementation of the new Innovation Fund, in order to increase business and investor certainty.
CCS is crucial to ensure the decarbonisation of energy-intensive industries as well as of the European electricity supply system. Bellona is, therefore, pleased to see the acknowledgement of CCS technology as key to meeting climate change objectives.
For over two decades, Bellona has been actively working on fostering the creation of a CCS-conducive policy framework. One important next step would be to ensure the smooth and timely operationalisation of the planned Innovation Fund. To this end it should build on lessons learnt from its predecessor, the NER300. Bellona will be publishing a response to the ETS consultation in the coming week, including detailed recommendations for the design of the Fund.
The Energy Union strategy is set to be approved later this year. EU Energy Ministers will discuss the Communication in Brussels on 5 March 2015 and during an informal gathering to be hosted by the Latvian presidency on 14-16 April 2015, before adopting a formal position at the Luxembourg Energy Council on 11-12 June 2015.
Tiny capsules can have big impact on carbon capture
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Using the same baking soda found in most grocery stores, we and our colleagues from Harvard University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, have created a significant advance in carbon dioxide capture.
We developed a new type of carbon capture media composed of microcapsules, tiny capsules designed to separate carbon dioxide in flue gases from power plants and other sources of emissions. Our approach offers a number of advantages over current methods.
The capsules are made of a highly permeable polymer shell, similar to what you find on a red kitchen spatula. Inside them is a fluid with sodium carbonate, a common chemical with many industrial uses. The sodium carbonate reacts with carbon dioxide (CO2) and transforms into harmless, stable sodium bicarbonate – the main ingredient in baking soda, the baking ingredient found in most kitchens.
The capsules keep the liquid contained inside the capsule core and allow the CO2 gas to pass back and forth through its shell.
During absorption, the CO2 diffuses through the thin capsule shells. Then, the gas dissolves and reacts in the liquid core to form the desired baking soda.
To extract the gas from the tiny capsules, the microcapsules are heated, which releases high-purity CO2, which can subsequently be compressed for storage or utilization. Once the CO2 is removed, the capsules can be reused.
To date, microcapsules have been used for controlled delivery and release of pharmaceuticals, food flavoring and cosmetics. But this is the first demonstration of this approach for controlled CO2 capture and release.
Material innovation
The aim of carbon capture is to prevent the release of large quantities of CO2 — a greenhouse gas that traps heat and makes the planet warmer — into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuel for power generation and other industries.
However, currently used methods, while successful, can be harmful to the environment. One well established carbon capture method is to use chemicals called amines to chemically react with CO2 and thus separate it from effluent gas. Our method is more environmentally benign because it uses carbonates rather than caustic fluids, such as monoethanol amine, to capture CO2 – a key attribute of our research.
The capsules on a quarter for scale.Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Also, the microcapsules only react with the gas of interest (in this case CO2).
The encapsulation process was developed as one of the Department of Energy’s inaugural Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) innovative carbon capture projects. The new process can be used in a wide range of situations. It can be designed to work with coal or natural gas-fired power plants, as well as in industrial processes like steel and cement production.
The technique is not a single, short-term solution to carbon capture, but a broad, sustainable approach. The sodium carbonate used in the process is mined domestically, rather than being made in a complex chemical process like the current technology of amines. In addition, baking soda has no recycling or degradation issues. It can be reused forever because the capsules are mechanically robust, while amines break down in a period of months to years.
Does combating climate change require burning the world’s forests and crops for fuel?
It certainly looks that way, judging from the aggressive mandates governments around the globe have set to incorporate bioenergy into their transportation fuels in the hope of limiting the world’s overwhelming dependence on gasoline and diesel to move people and goods.
While biofuels account for only about 2.5 percent today, the European Union expects renewable energy — mostly biofuels — to account for 10 percent of its transportation fuel by 2020. In the United States, the biofuel goal is about 12 percent by early in the next decade. The International Energy Agency envisions using biofuels to supply as much of 27 percent of the world’s transportation needs by midcentury.
The reasons for such ambitions are clear: It is nearly impossible under current technology to run cars, trucks, ships and jet planes on energy generated from wind or sun.
What is more, bioenergy is now being drafted to make electricity. Last November, officials at the Environmental Protection Agency issued a policy memo widely seen as encouraging the harvest of forests to produce power by treating it as a carbon-free source.
Used cooking oil can be collected from restaurants, to be recycled into biofuels.CreditJustin Sullivan/Getty Images
There is a big problem with this strategy, though. An economist would say that it ignores the “opportunity costs” of deploying vegetation as a source of energy. Others call it double counting.
“Dedicating land to bioenergy always comes at a cost because that land cannot produce plants for other purposes,” said Timothy Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton and the World Resources Institute and a co-writer of a recent report that calls for a rollback of crops dedicated to biofuels.
In a nutshell, says Mr. Searchinger, the energy from forests and fields is not, in fact, carbon-free.
The argument for aggressive deployment of bioenergy assumes that it is carbon-neutral because plants pull CO2 back from the air when they grow, offsetting the carbon emitted from burning them as fuel. But diverting a cornfield or a forest to produce energy requires not using it to make food or, just as important, to store carbon.
“Burning biomass instead of fossil fuels does not reduce the carbon emitted by power plants,” a group of 78 scientists wrote on Monday to Gina McCarthy, the E.P.A.’s director, warning against the new power plant policy. “Burning biomass, such as trees, that would otherwise continue to absorb and store carbon comes at the expense of reduced carbon storage.”
If the critics are right, the hunt for biomass on a large scale could vastly change the world’s land use, food supply and ecosystems while helping little to prevent climate change.
The argument for caution has so far mostly fallen on deaf ears. The reason is that policy makers see little choice.
Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rendered its latest assessment of scientists’ collective understanding of how to slow the pace of global warming. Riddled with the usual uncertainties of science, it seemed pretty certain of one thing: Doing it without biofuels would be much harder.
Absent a big increase in bioenergy supplies, the climate change panel’s analysis reported, it would cost about two-thirds more, on average, to prevent the earth’s temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, generally considered the tipping point for climatic upheaval.
The availability of biofuels makes more difference to the ultimate price tag, the panel concluded, than whether electricity generation can be harnessed successfully to the sun and wind. Only carbon capture and storage technology is more important.
In most of the climate change panel’s models that bring temperatures back under the 2-degree ceiling by the end of the century, biofuels are assumed to produce about 250 to 350 exajoules of energy a year.
To put that in context, 300 exajoules is over half the world’s current energy consumption. Today, the energy content of all the biomassharvested for food, fodder and everything else amounts to about 220 exajoules.
Photo
Dried distillers grains are a byproduct of the making of ethanol.CreditJeffrey M. Smith/The Port Huron Times Herald, via Associated Press
The question is, Where will the land to produce all this additional vegetation come from?
As a committee of the European Environmental Agency noted, to reduce the amount of CO2 in the air, bioenergy production “must increase the total amount of plant growth, making more plants available for energy use while preserving other benefits.”
André Faaij, an expert on energy systems at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and author of many important assessments used by the panel on the potential for bioenergy, argues that it is definitely feasible.
The world could feed 35 billion people (the earth’s current population is seven billion) if only the productivity of agriculture and livestock in the developing world were brought to developed country standards, he said. “Mozambique could feed all of Africa if it just increased its productivity to that of the Netherlands.”
That could free up a lot of land. Deploying just 10 percent of the world’s five billion hectares currently used for crops and pastures to grow biofuels could generate 100 to 150 exajoules by the end of the century. An additional 60 to 70 could be had from planting biofuels on currently degraded land. The rest could come from better harvesting of forests and the use of organic waste.
In a recent research article, Professor Faaij and colleagues calculated that it would be technically possible to get about 100 exajoules by 2050 from what they call “surplus forest growth,” meaning the bits of forest that are neither protected nor already exploited for wood, and wood waste.
This sort of calculation drives Mr. Searchinger up the wall. “Surplus forest growth” he said, is already pulling CO2 from the air. Harvesting it for energy will provide no further benefit for climate change. The same could be said of idled agricultural land, where forest usually starts regrowing soon, capturing carbon from the air.
“In many contexts, allowing a forest to grow will do more to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for decades than producing bioenergy,” he told me.
And he finds the estimates of future agricultural productivity unbelievable when applied to any reasonable understanding of the real world. Indeed, it will be hard to maintain the productivity growth of the last several decades, he says, let alone substantially increase it.
“Because the world needs to produce 70 percent more of virtually all the products of land — crops, grasses and wood — by 2050, there is no additional room for bioenergy, and any capacity to increase crop yields and to make better use of any underutilized land is already needed for these other purposes,” Mr. Searchinger said.
Professor Faaij says the skeptics are wrong, arguing that the alternatives to a huge increase in biofuel production would be even more difficult to achieve.
But it could be possible to produce the zero-carbon energy the world will need without incurring such steep opportunity costs. Much of the transport fleet could be electrified, reducing demand for liquid fuels. Solar power could be used to produce hydrogen to burn in fuel cells.
There is probably a limited role for biofuels from waste products. But the biofuels juggernaut — which has helped garner the support of agribusiness in the battle against climate change — could end up doing more harm than good.
The United States used to rely heavily on bioenergy for transport: 100 years ago, tens of millions of acres were devoted to growing feed for pack animals. Since then, much of this land has reverted to forest. Razing it again for fuel is not the best idea.
SaskPower hailed the Boundary Dam Carbon Capture Project as landmark, and the "first of its kind," but now a new paper is called the project environmentally and financially irresponsible.
The paper published by the left-leaning think tank, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives said the $1.4 billion spent on the project was possibly too much for SaskPower unless it's permitted to raise rates, which will end up costing more for customers across the province.
It also states that the risk was very high for the project, and the future financial rewards from the technology are "questionable."
Upgrades to the Queen Elizabeth plant or a wind farm would have been a better investment, said Mark Bigland-Pritchard, an independent environmental analyst who co-authored the paper with Brian Banks, a former director of the CCPA's Saskatchewan office.
Thanks to federal regulations, without the carbon capture project, the coal plant would have had to be shut down. But Bigland-Pritchard said coal is a very expensive way of generating electricity.
"We could actually generate the same power from wind for probably half the price, so why are we not doing that? Every country which is making a serious attempt to cut its carbon emissions is taking that route rather than the CCS (carbon capture and storage) route."
Bigland-Pritchard supports leaving coal behind completely as an energy source. He said that renewable resources are a proven pathway, whereas carbon capture technology is very expensive and unproven.
The paper also criticized the project on an environmental basis. SaskPower touts it as capturing one million tonnes of greenhouse gases, but the paper said that's only about seven per cent of all greenhouse gases generated by Saskatchewan's coal power, and less than two per cent of the province's total emissions.
It also took issue with the deal the province has made with Cenovus Energy to buy some of the carbon that it captures to use in the oil fields. The paper explained that for every tonne of carbon injected into the earth, about 2.7 times as much carbon dioxide will be put into the air from the burning of the extra oil taken out of the ground.
The paper called the decision to go with the Boundary Dam project a political one, coming from the provincial government. Bigland-Pritchard said he's not against carbon capture technology.
"I think we may be needing this technology in future, but now, I think, is not the time for it."
Banks and Bigland-Pritchard aren't the first to bring up concerns with the project. Just before the facility opened last year, John Bennett, director of environment group Sierra Club of Canada told the Globe and Mail, "It’s a waste of vital capital that should be invested in conservation, efficiency and renewable (energy).”
At the project's launch, Premier Brad Wall said it strikes a balance between the energy we need and protecting the environment.
In response to the paper, SaskPower went over the positives of the project. The Crown corporation said it's providing affordable coal power to 100,000 homes and businesses that's ten times cleaner than other coal units. Greenhouse gas emissions have been reduced after SaskPower shut down units 1 and 2 at the Boundary Dam Power Station.
SaskPower said it's reduced its reliance on coal power from 65 per cent to 45 per cent in the last ten years. Last year, over 25 per cent of power in Saskatchewan came from renewable resources, including hydro, wind, and biomass.
The UAE is a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol which calls for commitment to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and therefore mitigate their impact on climate change.
ADCO in its strive to be an active participant in implementing the National aspiration, has therefore created a specialized department named Carbon Management Department, within the Technical Support Division, to achieve this objective. Success of utilization of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in ADCO reservoirs will achieve two major objectives:
The UK government has signed an agreement with Canada to work together on research and knowledge sharing for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).
Both countries released a joint statement which identifies how they plan to work together and build on stride already made.
The use of CCS is viewed as one of the most cost effective technologies for decarbonisation of the UK’s power.
It has the potential to reduce carbon emissions and store it deep underground.
Minister of State for Energy, Matthew Hancock, said: “Carbon capture and storage could help us tackle climate change.
“I welcome the fact that the UK and Canada will be working together to advance the technology. Our agreement is an important step forward for the carbon capture and storage sector, and I look forward to further UK-Canada cooperation.”
The UK has positioned itself as one of the world’s frontrunners in carbon capture, leading Europe with two commercial scale carbon capture and storage projects including a development in Peterhead in Scotland and White Rose in Yorkshire.
The European Council has recently agreed to increase the EU’s carbon reduction target to at least 40% in 2030 compared to 1990 levels, while Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) has also been explicitly included as eligible under a new NER400 funding programme.
The latter is seen as another important milestone for the development of CCS, and has been welcomed by both the Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA) and the Global CCS Institute.
The council has agreed that Member States should be free to choose the most appropriate technologies to reduce emissions with the target of at least 27% renewable energy in the mix by 2030, binding only at an EU level.
For the first time ever, a large-scale, coal-fired power plant is capturing carbon dioxide to keep it from being released into the atmosphere – a milestone for a technology critical to addressing climate change.
Canadian electric utility SaskPower has switched on unit 3 at its Boundary Dam power plant, about 10 miles from the North Dakota border, and will hold an official grand opening Oct. 2. Following a $1.2 billion retrofit, the 46-year-old, 110-megawatt coal unit is now on course toward capturing 90 percent of its carbon emissions. Other upgrades reduce nitrous oxide emissions and capture 100 percent of the unit’s sulfur dioxide emissions.
Numerous commercial-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology projects have been deployed in the industrial sector. In the power sector, demonstration-scale projects have been deployed, but this is the first commercial-scale project.
We will need to construct hundreds of such projects (along with other zero- and lower-emitting technologies) if greenhouse gas emissions are to be reduced to levels that avoid the worst effects of climate change. According to the International Energy Agency, more than 440 terawatt-hours (TWh) of CCS must be generated between 2020 and 2035 to give us a chance of limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. To get a sense of that scale, SaskPower’s unit 3 can produce up to 1 TWh of electricity per year.
The Boundary Dam project is important not just because it’s the first of its kind, but because it demonstrates a way to help make carbon capture technology economically viable -- by turning unwanted pollutants into valuable commodities. SaskPower has agreed to transport and sell its captured carbon dioxide (CO2) to an oilfield operated by Cenovus for use in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) operations. The captured CO2 helps coax additional production from declining oil fields and results in the permanent storage of the CO2 underground. (In addition, captured sulfur dioxide emissions will be used to produce 50 tons per day of sulfuric acid for industrial customers, and SaskPower will sell the plant’s coal combustion residuals, also known as coal ash, for use in construction products like drywall and concrete.)
Selling captured carbon dioxide for use in enhanced oil recovery provides a vital revenue stream for CCS projects, helping offset high investment costs, particularly for first-movers like SaskPower. In fact, most existing or planned carbon capture projects in the world today are taking advantage of CO2-EOR. In the process, they are helping to advance the technology and demonstrate its broader potential in curbing carbon emissions.
Other factors also came together to make this project work, including the fact that SaskPower has an abundant source of inexpensive lignite coal near the power plant, and if need be, SaskPower can securely store its CO2 emissions in a nearby, deep-underground saline formation. Available storage will be critical for all CCS projects in the near-term, especially if an EOR option is not available.
SaskPower refurbished the coal unit at a cost of $300 million. Building the capture facility was projected to cost around $790 million, of which the Canadian government contributed $220 million.
When I visited the plant earlier this year, SaskPower acknowledged that the capture facility had been over-engineered to ensure it would deliver on its targeted 90 percent capture rate. Right-sizing future capture facilities and applying lessons learned during construction of this facility mean the costs for similar projects will come down over time, which is critical to wider deployment and lower global CO2 emissions.
That’s important because coal-fired electricity generation is not going away anytime soon. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in an analysis of its recently proposed carbon limits for existing power plants, projects coal will still supply more than 30 percent of U.S electricity in 2030, down only 9 percentage points from today’s levels. Meanwhile, coal use in the developing world is soaring. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s International Energy Outlook, coal consumption in developing countries, led by China and India, is expected to increase 70 percent by 2040.
With more than 2,300 coal-fired power plants around the world, deployment of post-combustion carbon capture and storage technology like what’s in use at the Boundary Dam power plant is an important way to reduce greenhouse gases and a significant step in the right direction.
Doug Vine is a Senior Energy Fellow at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. He is responsible for supporting the Center’s work on global and domestic energy production and utilization. Additionally, he focuses on topical energy issues including electric power, natural gas and oil market developments.
