12 November 2009
International Collaboration Key to Mitigating Climate Change
Nations cooperate to develop carbon dioxide capture-and-storage technology
This is part one in a series about new international collaborations that are forming to mitigate the most disastrous effects of climate change.
Washington — Human activities, especially those that burn fossil fuels and emit planet-warming carbon dioxide, are driving changes in the climate system. Mitigating these changes and their potentially disastrous effects is stimulating a new kind of technology cooperation among governments, industries and institutions.
Mitigating climate change means slowing its effects — sea level rise, melting glaciers, ecosystem disturbances, weather extremes — by reducing industrial emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere or increasing carbon dioxide uptake by natural reservoirs like forests, soils and seas, called carbon sinks.
Technological options exist for reducing carbon dioxide emissions, including improving energy efficiency, switching from high-carbon (coal) to low-carbon (natural gas) fossil fuels, using more renewable (solar, wind) and nuclear power, enhancing natural carbon dioxide sinks in agriculture and forestry, and accelerating the development of carbon capture and storage (CCS) — an emerging technology that captures carbon dioxide from industrial processes and stores it deep underground for long periods of time. (See “Governments, Industry Working to Stem CO2 Emissions from Coal.”)
“We can anticipate that out into the future fossil fuels are going to remain a part of the energy mix,” Sally Benson, director of Stanford University’s Global Climate and Energy Project, said at an October 30 briefing in Washington. “If we’re going to achieve the 50 percent to 80 percent reduction in emissions that is likely to be needed by the middle of the century, it’s going to be very difficult to do this without CCS.”
GETTING BEHIND CCS
CCS is an emissions-reduction technology that can be used with any large industrial plant that emits carbon dioxide, including coal-fired power plants, natural gas processing, and oil and gas development activities. The process involves capturing carbon dioxide emissions that are a byproduct of the industrial process, then either storing the gas deep underground or injecting it into depleted oil and gas fields.
Support for developing and commercializing the technology is growing around the world. In 2005, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a special report on carbon dioxide capture and storage. “CCS,” the authors wrote, “has the potential to reduce overall mitigation costs and increase flexibility in achieving greenhouse gas emission reductions.”
During their 2008 meeting in Aomori, Japan, energy ministers from the Group of Eight nations — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States — committed to developing 20 large-scale CCS projects by 2020. In 2009, the Australian government launched the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute. More than 20 governments and 80 companies and nongovernmental and research organizations already have signed on as foundation members or participants to accelerate CCS commercial deployment.
INTERNATIONAL INVOLVEMENT
Several large commercial projects are in operation around the world, along with international research projects and pending commercial projects in countries that include Norway, Canada, Australia, the United States and China. Nearly all ongoing projects have international involvement.
The Sleipner project, begun in 1996 in Norway’s North Sea by international energy company StatoilHydro, is the world’s first commercial CCS project, storing 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. The Canadian Weyburn project, begun in 2000, receives piped-in carbon dioxide from the Great Plains Synfuels Plant in North Dakota that is injected into depleted oil fields in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. Ultimately, the project expects to store 20 million tons of carbon dioxide. The In Salah CCS project in the Algerian desert, begun in 2004, is a joint project of Algeria’s national energy company, Sonatrach, London-based energy company BP and the Norwegian Statoil. It stores 1 million tons of carbon dioxide a year.
“The most successful partnerships are those built around real projects,” Benson said. “If you look at the Sleipner project, the monitoring and assessment was an international collaboration. Weyburn involved people from all over the world. The In Salah project in Algeria has acted as a test bed for Europeans, and the U.S. is also investing in work there. To me, really getting your hands on data and operational experience are the kinds of activities that are most fruitful.”
STEEL ON THE GROUND
China’s government and industries are also serious about CCS and other clean energy technologies, Julio Friedmann, head of the Carbon Management Program at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, told America.gov.
With Australia, China built and tested a carbon capture and heat recovery technology and is retrofitting it on Beijing’s largest power plant. It has operated for a year and is taking 3,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year. Using the same capture technology, the Chinese are scaling up a 100,000-ton-per-year carbon dioxide effort in Shanghai that will be open in April 2010 in time for the World Expo there in May.
“This is real steel on the ground,” Friedmann said, “and it’s actually capturing CO2.”
The GreenGen CCS project near Tianjin is a partnership among China’s largest power company, Huaneng, the largest oil company, PetroChina, and other utilities. The project combines CCS with a technology called integrated gasification combined cycle. Phase 1 is 30 percent complete. In August, Huaneng and U.S. company Duke Energy signed an agreement to cooperate on CCS and other clean energy technologies.
The United States — through the Department of Energy and West Virginia University — is working with China’s Shenhua Energy Company on coal conversion technologies and CCS at a plant that has been operating for months in the Ordos Basin. The plant is on track to be completed within two years, Friedmann said, and two years after that will be storing 3 million tons of carbon dioxide.
“It’s clear that there are many opportunities in China both within the power sector and low-cost options outside the power sector,” Friedmann said. “Those opportunities create an opportunity for the United States in terms of its policy to think about appropriate ways to engage.”
More information about the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute is available at the organization’s Web site.
Find more information about international CCS collaborations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s CCS site and the Scottish Center for Carbon Storage at the University of Edinburgh.
