Engineering news
Britain has the opportunity to become a world leader in terms of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology for gas-fired power stations but urgent action to develop it is required, experts at the IMechE have warned.
The IMechE welcomed the Committee on Climate Change’s letter to new climate secretary Chris Huhne last week, which called on the government to consider developing CCS systems for gas-fired plant as well as coal-fired power stations. Experts at the institution said there was a need for an urgent move forward if such technology was to be developed in time to retrofit a generation of new gas-fired power stations that is expected to be built in the next ten years.
Dr Tim Fox, head of energy and climate change at the IMechE, said: “We’re very pleased to see that the Committee on Climate Change has a similar view to our own on the engineering challenge of CCS for gas-fired power stations. A carbon capture and storage programme for gas power plants is the only logical and pragmatic route to take. We want to see a move forward.”
Fox said that meeting targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions made in 2008’s Climate Change Act would require CCS to be introduced for new gas-fired power stations, although it is for coal-fuelled plant that the technology is currently being considered. With a significant proportion of Britain’s nuclear and coal-fired power stations due to come off-line, a second so-called “dash for gas” is now “inevitable”, Fox said.
The urgent requirement to develop CCS technology for gas is due to the fact that some 29GW of new gas generation capacity is currently under construction or in the planning process. Engineers need to get to grips with the challenge of designing CCS systems for these new stations early on, Fox said. “The design and implementation of these power stations needs to take place in the context of considering a future CCS capability.”
Under the Climate Change Act, the UK has a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050. This would require power stations to generate electricity with emissions of under 100g/CO2 per kWh by 2030 and even lower thereafter. To put that figure into perspective, gas-fired power stations are estimated on average to produce 400g/CO2 per kWh, so some form of CCS will be required.
Britain would be the only country in the world developing such technology for gas-fired plant if it moved to do it now, experts said. A project to do so in Norway has recently been cancelled. Fox said: “We could turn this situation in which there is a dash for gas from a negative into a positive. We’ve found ourselves in this situation as a result of a number of factors.
“We can take advantage of that and be the first country in the world to develop CCS technology for gas turbines, which is a technology that will be needed worldwide in the future.”