Engineering news
One of two projects in competition for a £1 billion pot of government funding to develop the UK's first commercial Carbon Capture and Storage plant received a major boost this week when its storage site was deemed fit-for-purpose by geological experts.
The government's “Carbon Capture and Storage Commercialisation Programme” is making up to £1 billion available to develop CCS projects in the UK. A competition for the £1 billion is due to complete “late 2015” according to the Department for Environment and Climate Change.
Two projects have been put forward as preferred bidders – the Shell Peterhead gas carbon capture and storage (CCS) project and the White Rose coal CCS project at Drax.
CCS technology has had several false starts in the UK. An almost identical CCS project at Peterhead was proposed by BP in 2007, but abandoned because of lack of government support.
In a key step forward, this week the British Geological Society confirmed that the part of the North Sea engineers want to use for the Peterhead project is suitable for CO2 storage.
However oil firm Shell is reluctant to commit to the project, which will be the first commercial CCS plant in the UK and the first gas CCS plant in the world if it goes ahead, until the government commits public funding.
Shell said: “The process is such that Shell will take a decision on the potential project around the end of the year, and then the government will take theirs – the timing is in their hands.”
The Peterhead Carbon Capture and Storage project will capture the CO2 from one of the existing 385MW combined cycle gas turbines (CCGT) at the Peterhead power station. The power station will be retrofitted with Shell's Cansolv amine technology, a post-combustion system that uses a regenerable solvent to capture CO2 from flue gas.
CO2 will then be pumped 62 miles offshore to the Goldeneye reservoir, where it will be injected into sandstone rock 1.6 miles underground. Up to fifteen million tonnes of CO2 will be injected into the reservoir over fifteen years, although experts from the BGS said the reservoir could store up to 20 million tonnes.
Speaking earlier this month at the SPE Offshore Europe conference in Aberdeen, Xavier Riera-Palou, manager of the Shell CO2 strategy team, said: “We are very close to the opening of our Quest project in Canada, which will capture 2 million tonnes of carbon a year. We are also progressing with the Peterhead project, which will be the first project in the world to capture CO2 from the gas power generation process.”
“But we are going to need a hell of a lot more CCS projects by the end of the century to get net zero emissions. We need a lot more effort if we are going to get anywhere near that goal.”
As well as the Quest oil sands project in Alberta, Canada, Shell is also part of the Gorgon project in Australia, which is developing pre-combustion storage technology.
The other preferred bidder for the UK's Carbon Capture and Storage Commercialisation Programme, the White Rose project, will see a 426MW coal power plant use Alstom's Oxyfuel process to extract CO2 during combustion. The power station will be built at the existing Drax site in Yorkshire, with partners BOC and the National Grid collaborating on the pipeline transmission and storage of the CO2 to an underground reservoir in the North Sea.
Front end engineering and design for both Peterhead and White Rose is being conducted after the government awarded £100 million to them to progress the designs.
Our analysis of the world's leading CCS projects and the technologies behind them can be found here.