Making the case for carbon capture

There's a lot of hype around carbon capture and storage as the technology with the potential to stop emissions in their tracks.

Paul Soffe, associate director of Dublin-based EcoSecurities (AIM:ECO), one of the first companies to generate and monetize carbon credits, heads up the company's research and development unit in the UK. He gets to look at newest ways clean technologies could reduce emissions from the oil and gas sector, and at co-firing power generation projects.

Soffe spoke to the Cleantech Group about what's inhibiting this technology from being implemented tomorrow.

Paul Soffe of EcoSecurities

What’s important to know about carbon capture and storage?

It’s the big one, the biggest technology with the potential to help, but there are myths that need to be dispelled.

There’s so much rubbish about it said in the media and by environmental NGOs. It’s very much a proven technology in oil and gas production, and could be implemented tomorrow under the Clean Development Mechanism if we had the approval of some of the governments that control the Kyoto Protocol and carbon trading mechanisms, but the Brazilian government is opposing it.

Is there any end in sight to that opposition?

We hope other countries will unite and push Brazil to one side at the Copenhagen convention next year.

The EU position is we should let pilot projects into the clean development mechanism. I hope that with the combination of the EU, US and Middle East, which can only reduce carbon emissions through carbon capture and storage, that Brazil backs down.

You say this technology can be deployed tomorrow?

It’s very much a proven technology. It’s a requirement in Norway that in the oil and gas sector you have to sequester carbon already.

BP also did a carbon capture and storage pilot project in Algeria. But it’s a new technology in terms of applying it to power stations.

In my mind this is a race to the moon. The company that get this up and running in places such as China and India will be able to make massive amounts of money helping us hit the emissions reductions we need.

So what’s stopping CCS from being used in power plants?

A lot of it’s to do with the cost. It’s still quite expensive.

In oil and gas, you already separate the CO₂ because you don’t want that in your gas, so the technology’s there. In power systems, that same technology could be adapted. There are people who have captured CO₂ from power plants but there;s nobody who’s got it in large scale production. Then there’s the question of storage and the transportation of CO₂. They need to be located near saline aquifers, for one.

Is the capture part easier than the storage for power plants?

It hasn’t been decided which method of capture is more appropriate, pre-combustion or post-combustion.

In the UK, the government is willing to spend hundreds of millions [of pounds] on post combustion. That way it can be more readily retrofitted onto existing power stations. In Oxford, the local coal-fired power station recently announced that N Power plans to install capture technology to pilot and test that.

There are steps. You didn’t fly straight to the moon. You had to test the rockets first.

This is a very big opportunity for oil and gas companies because they have the storage capabilities. That’s what they’ve been doing for 50 years. In the next 50 years, the ones who aren’t blind to progress will find a big part of their business will be carbon storage.

What’s happening in storage technologies?

We know how to storage gases underground, but one of the main unanswered questions in storage is how well does it work? Is it seeping into rocks?

A lot of work being done by scientists to show what happens when you put gas two miles underground (see MIT unlocking carbon capture and storage).

I recently attended a CCS conference organized by Cambridge University, and the most amazing thing I heard at this conference was a talk by Alstom about how they are proposing a plant using 20 percent biomass, and then using technology for 100 percent carbon capture and storage, which would actually start cleaning the atmosphere of CO₂ because the biomass part would take CO₂ out of the atmosphere.

Eventually, if we can convert all the Indian and Chinese power stations to CCS, we can have an accelerated decrease to the current emissions. These are the solutions to our climate change problems, not the stupid technologies that won’t make a difference.

What are the "stupid technologies"?

Things like solar, for example. Solar is going to be a very small player in the long run.

Some environmental groups say CCS just gives an excuse for people to not to change behavior and that behavior changes are necessary to make an impact. Wouldn’t something like solar help?

If we’re talking about 80 percent CO₂ cuts, we are going to have to make a lot of changes.

People won’t be able to fly around the world as much. They might have to go by ship instead of flying. That sort of modifying behavior I have nothing against. And with solar, it has to be deployed where it can, like for solar water heating systems. That’s not going to lead to huge amounts of reductions. For that you need carbon capture and storage and large deployments of offshore wind.

What are some of the newest technologies in CCS?

There’s a lot of research, but one problem we have is that a lot of it is being done secretly. None of the technology providers want to say too much.

So that's why you think there’s a lot of misunderstandings about CCS?

I think so. But the governments are very supportive of carbon capture and storage in America and Europe. In Europe by 2015 or 2020, we’ll have 15 of these projects up and running. It will cost billions, but these are large scale demonstration projects, not pilots.

Talking about carbon capture and storage is a bit like talking about renewable energy. It’s a very large sector divided into number of sub-sectors. It’s dangerous to generalize.

In renewables, you have proven technologies like hydropower and unproven like solar thermal. It’s the same in carbon capture and storage. You have technologies that can be implemented tomorrow in oil and gas, but in terms of power generation it might be five, 10 or 15 years before we have that deployed.

If the technology is there for oil and gas, why is it not being used?

It’s enormously expensive, and apart from Norway there’s no other country that’s making them do it. So if Obama says that has to happen, of course the oil companies are going to say they will have to pass that cost on. Eventually Obama’s going to have to swallow it.

Whatever we do there’s going to be cost of action. But the cost of inaction is that America will have to house 1 million Bangladeshis, and New Orleans is going to be nonexistent. If you look at it in that broader sense, the action now is certainly worth taking.

What else is inhibiting CCS?

The immediate opposition is still very much in getting pilot scale projects up and running and getting it [CCS] accepted in emissions trading schemes. The one thing the Obama administration badly needs to do is establish a domestic trading scheme. Then you might start to see more carbon capture and storage projects being implemented in the oil and gas sector.

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