While carbon capture and sequestration technology remains controversial, studies to delve deeper into it are ongoing in hopes of presenting one way to alleviate emission levels. A team from MIT has been studying a carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technique called pressurized oxy-fuel combustion. This process converts the carbon dioxide emissions of a power plant into a pressurized liquid stream meant to be pumped underground. Team leader Ahmed Ghoniem of MIT claims that his team is the only one conducting an academic study of “pressurized combustion system for carbon dioxide capture.”

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The House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming recently heard from a panel of leading edge scientists and industry executives on the state of existing U.S. clean technology and the lack of funding for developing and scaling the technology into commercially viable products and services.

The primary technologies discussed were solar and carbon capture technologies. Dr. Brent Constantz, CEO of Calera Corporation, which focuses on a transformational technology that converts CO2 into green building materials such as cement and aggregate, argues that this process is better than traditional CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage or Sequestration), as it represents a permanent CO2 conversion from gas to solid material.

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Plans were announced today that will bring the United States and China together in order to fight the issue of global climate change. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Chinese Minister of Science Wan Gang, and Administrator of National Energy Administration Zhang Guo Bao announced plans to develop a U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center, which will facilitate cooperative research and development of clean energy systems.

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Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) has the potential to cut global Co2 emissions dramatically. We’re talking huge cuts. It has been estimated that a plant implementing CCS can cut emissions by 80-90 percent compared with a plant that doesn’t use CCS. Sounds great, right? Well, there are some some problems.

Cost is the number one challenge that CCS faces. “Applying it would significantly increase the cost of electricity beyond what society is likely willing to pay,” said Sarah Forbes,  a World Resources Institute Senior Associate. Another challenge is that no fully integrated demonstrations have taken place. The pieces have been tested individually, but the entire puzzle is yet to be seen.

Forbes describes CCS and its current challenges in more detail:

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At a power plant at Lacq, energy company Total has upgraded an existing gas-fired boiler with CCS technology – a crucial step towards reducing carbon emissions from fossil-fuel power plants worldwide.

With renewable energy sources a long way from covering the world’s increasing demand for energy, many experts believe that developing reliable technology to allow countries to burn fossil fuels without releasing dangerous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere is essential to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

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Did Canadian Environment Minister Jim Prentice speak too presumptively on Friday when he said the capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide is already proven and being applied on a commercial basis?

Speaking in the context of the recently agreed upon U.S.-Canada dialogue on clean energy and the upcoming Copenhagen round of climate talks, The Canadian Press reports that Environment Minister JIm Prentice said that carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is a critical component of the energy equation that is currently being applied commercially “in enhanced oil recovery kinds of operations” and will be in the future.

Prentice was referring to the Weyburn oilfied project owned and operated by EnCana which receives CO2 transported via pipeline from a lignite-fired coal-to-liquid fuel plant in North Dakota and injects it into underground reservoirs, thereby making the oil fields “more productive.”

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The draft would require 6 percent emission reductions by 2020, compared to 19 percent in the Senate bill. But the caps would accelerate in later years to require 80 percent reductions by 2050, which is actually faster than the total proposed reductions in the Senate version. The eighty percent reduction by 2050 would also matched the proposed targets released by Democratic candidate for President, Barack Obama.

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In an attempt to continue using the large coal deposits bespeckling our planet, while still keeping greenhouse gas emission down, one of Europe’s biggest power companies has turned to Carbon Capture and Storage, or CCS for short.

Vattenfall, a Swedish owned firm, will be using CCS at the site of the new “Schwarze Pumpe”, Black Pump, located in the Lausitz region in the State of Brandenburg. The pilot unit, which has a thermal capacity of 30 megawatts, has cost approximately Euro 70 million over the past 15 months.

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“Currently, the existing U.S. coal fleet accounts for over half of all electricity generated in this country,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman said in a release. “The projects announced today will combat climate change and help meet current and future energy needs by curbing CO2 emissions from existing coal-fired plants.”

But carbon capture and sequestration, along with “clean coal” are still perceived by many as mythical technologies that are simply not cost effective.

My question is this: If carbon capture and sequestration is such a central component of President Bush’s broader energy vision, why aren’t they doing more about it?  To put things in perspective, since 2001 the Bush administration has invested more than $2.5 billion in clean coal research and development - roughly the same amount it spends per week on the Iraq war.

Oh, and that $36 million figure mentioned at the top of this article? $36 million is roughly equal to what the U.S. spends on the Iraq war in two and a half hours.

Read more about the specific projects receiving funding at the DOE’s website.

Other posts on the DOE and carbon capture/sequestration:

• “Assistant Secretary of Energy Karsner Announces Resignation”
• “EPA Drafts Rule for Carbon Sequestration”
• “Wyoming Passes Carbon Capture and Sequestration Legislation”
• “CO2 Capture and Technology of the Future”

Photo: hAdamsky via flickr under a Creative Commons License

Despite agreement from almost all sides that CCS must be made commercial if the world can ever hope to meet its carbon-reduction targets, a full-scale system remains years away, largely because of the costs involved in its development. As a result, many leading power companies have been reluctant to fund CCS individually, arguing that governments should also shoulder some of the financial risks.

The UK government wants to fund a single demonstration plant using post-combustion capture technology and is running a competition to decide which new power station will get the go-ahead. Within the next few weeks, ministers are expected to announce proposals on how to fund further CCS projects in the UK beyond the competition.

But the British government’s procrastination has forced many CCS projects planned in the past decade to be abandoned or moved abroad. These include BP’s plans to build a carbon capture plant at Peterhead and Centrica’s Eston Grange project.

Haszledine also criticised the lack of research effort in the UK, saying just over £6m has been spent on CCS research in the UK in the past decade compared with $2bn to date in Canada, and annual spends of around £40m in Norway and several hundreds of millions of dollars in Australia. New CCS demonstration projects are due to start operating later this year in the United States and Australia.

At Lacq, Total has fitted one of the plant’s 30MW gas-fired boilers with oxyfuel technology, where the fossil fuel is burned in an atmosphere enriched with oxygen. The resulting exhaust gas is then composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide and water vapour, which can be easily separated and stored.

“Total needs to master this new technology,” said Luc de Marliave, climate change coordinator at the energy company. “Oxycombustion had never been tested at this scale in such an integrated CCS scheme.”

Philippe Paelinck of Alstom, the engineeering company that designed and built the CCS equipment at Lacq, said the experiment was an important milestone. “We first proved the feasibility of retrofitting an installation to carbon capture and storage, but also this will be the first demonstration in Europe of CCS with [existing] integrated CO2 pipeline transportation and storage.”

De Marliave said Total chose to test oxyfuel because it could potentially save costs in future. “Our calculations showed that, with oxycombustion in that type of application, you could reduce the cost of capture – which is a large part of the cost of the CCS chain – around two-thirds of the cost roughly. For just capture, existing post combustion technologies would cost you something like 70 euros per tonne of CO2. Oxycombustion could reduce this to 35 euros per tonne.”

Despite that, he said Total was still open to the investigating the other types of CCS technology, both pre- and post- combustion. “We are not set on one technology. We selected oxycombusiton for the pilot but it doesn’t mean that we are not very much interested in post-combustion as well.”

Plans for government-funded CCS demonstration plants across Europe have been moving slowly. The EU wants 12 demonstration plants in operation next decade and has reserved 300m carbon credits from the next stage of the European emissions trading scheme to help fund the technology.

In January, the European Commission proposed earmarking €1.25bn to kickstart carbon capture and storage (CCS) at 11 coal-fired plants across Europe, including four in Britain: the Kingsnorth plant in Kent, Longannet in Fife, Tilbury in Essex and Hatfield in Yorkshire would share €250m under the two-year scheme.

* Written by Alok Jha of the Guardian and published at EcoWorldly via the Guardian Environment Network.

Image credit: pfala via Flickr, under a Creative Commons license.

According to the EPA, the annual cost associated with the implementation of the rule are estimated to be around $15 million.

“Today’s proposal paves the way for technologies that would protect public health and help reduce the effects of climate change,” said EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson. “With proper site selection and management, geologic sequestration could play a major role in reducing emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”

EPA’s proposed regulation creates a national framework for the injection of carbon dioxide underground and protection of underground drinking water resources. The agency acted under the Clean Water Act because injecting carbon dioxide could push pollutants into underground drinking water supplies, according to Benjamin H. Grumbles, assistant EPA administrator for water. The rule would create a new class of injection wells under the authority of the Safe Drinking Water Act’s Underground Injection Control (UIC) program.

According to an EPA Factsheet (EPA 816-F-08-031), the new monitoring rule is needed because:

“The relative buoyancy of CO2, its corrosivity in the presence of water, the potential presence of impurities in captured CO2, its mobility within subsurface formations, and large injection volumes anticipated at full scale deployment warrant specific requirements tailored to this new practice.”

The rule, which would apply to well owners and operators, would require monitoring to trace the chemical, squeezed down into liquid form. “A cornerstone of this rule is that the carbon dioxide stays where it is put, and not leak or be released to the surface,” Mr. Grumbles said.

EPA is requesting public comments on the proposed rule for 120 days.

Other posts on carbon and carbon policy:

• “Wyoming Passes Carbon Capture and Sequestration Legislation”
• “CO2 Capture and Technology of the Future”
• “British Columbia Begins Taxing Carbon”

Photo: thewritingzone via flickr under a Creative Commons License

Despite agreement from almost all sides that CCS must be made commercial if the world can ever hope to meet its carbon-reduction targets, a full-scale system remains years away, largely because of the costs involved in its development. As a result, many leading power companies have been reluctant to fund CCS individually, arguing that governments should also shoulder some of the financial risks.

The UK government wants to fund a single demonstration plant using post-combustion capture technology and is running a competition to decide which new power station will get the go-ahead. Within the next few weeks, ministers are expected to announce proposals on how to fund further CCS projects in the UK beyond the competition.

But the British government’s procrastination has forced many CCS projects planned in the past decade to be abandoned or moved abroad. These include BP’s plans to build a carbon capture plant at Peterhead and Centrica’s Eston Grange project.

Haszledine also criticised the lack of research effort in the UK, saying just over £6m has been spent on CCS research in the UK in the past decade compared with $2bn to date in Canada, and annual spends of around £40m in Norway and several hundreds of millions of dollars in Australia. New CCS demonstration projects are due to start operating later this year in the United States and Australia.

At Lacq, Total has fitted one of the plant’s 30MW gas-fired boilers with oxyfuel technology, where the fossil fuel is burned in an atmosphere enriched with oxygen. The resulting exhaust gas is then composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide and water vapour, which can be easily separated and stored.

“Total needs to master this new technology,” said Luc de Marliave, climate change coordinator at the energy company. “Oxycombustion had never been tested at this scale in such an integrated CCS scheme.”

Philippe Paelinck of Alstom, the engineeering company that designed and built the CCS equipment at Lacq, said the experiment was an important milestone. “We first proved the feasibility of retrofitting an installation to carbon capture and storage, but also this will be the first demonstration in Europe of CCS with [existing] integrated CO2 pipeline transportation and storage.”

De Marliave said Total chose to test oxyfuel because it could potentially save costs in future. “Our calculations showed that, with oxycombustion in that type of application, you could reduce the cost of capture – which is a large part of the cost of the CCS chain – around two-thirds of the cost roughly. For just capture, existing post combustion technologies would cost you something like 70 euros per tonne of CO2. Oxycombustion could reduce this to 35 euros per tonne.”

Despite that, he said Total was still open to the investigating the other types of CCS technology, both pre- and post- combustion. “We are not set on one technology. We selected oxycombusiton for the pilot but it doesn’t mean that we are not very much interested in post-combustion as well.”

Plans for government-funded CCS demonstration plants across Europe have been moving slowly. The EU wants 12 demonstration plants in operation next decade and has reserved 300m carbon credits from the next stage of the European emissions trading scheme to help fund the technology.

In January, the European Commission proposed earmarking €1.25bn to kickstart carbon capture and storage (CCS) at 11 coal-fired plants across Europe, including four in Britain: the Kingsnorth plant in Kent, Longannet in Fife, Tilbury in Essex and Hatfield in Yorkshire would share €250m under the two-year scheme.

* Written by Alok Jha of the Guardian and published at EcoWorldly via the Guardian Environment Network.

Image credit: pfala via Flickr, under a Creative Commons license.

As climate change become a more central issue for people and governments around the globe, a lot of people are looking for solutions - fast solutions. If there were a quick and inexpensive way to dramatically reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, we should go for it right? Well a number of “quick fix” solutions, which have centered around hacking the environment to fight climate change, have been floating around for years. One strategy is to capture the CO2 with plankton and bury it in the ocean (which is much easier and cheaper than pumping it into the ground). Another is to change the composition of our atmosphere to reflect sunlight. Others tend to be more sci-fi and outlandish - but all of them might just turn out to be disastrous.

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