CCS Update

Burning fossil fuels results in emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂), a greenhouse gas linked to climate change. One of the ways of reducing these emissions is carbon capture and storage. CCS involves, capturing the CO₂ at the source – large emitters such as power stations or industrial plants. The CO₂ is then trucked or piped to where it can be injected into deep geologic formations where it remains instead of being emitted into the atmosphere.

Crude oil reservoirs are well-suited for storing CO₂. They are deep, sealed by the same rocks that have sealed in the oil, and, in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) projects, injecting CO₂ helps to recover more oil.

The most studied CCS/EOR project is the Weyburn field in Saskatchewan, where more than 13 million tonnes of CO₂ have been injected since 2000. That’s the equivalent of taking more than 3.5 million cars off the road for one year.

But there are others. FLOW looked at some CCS projects two years ago. Enhance Energy’s Alberta Carbon Trunk Line (ACTL), a pipeline that will take CO₂ from large emitters in Fort Saskatchewan and Strathcona County to oilfields in south-central Alberta, received approval under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act in September 2010. Construction on the capture facilities could begin as soon as 2012, and on the pipeline itself in 2013. When fully operational, it will have the same impact as taking 2.6 million passenger vehicles off the road.

TransAlta, Capital Power, TransCanada and Enbridge are partners in Project Pioneer, which is designed to capture one million tonnes of CO₂ per year from the Keephills 3 coal-fired electricity generation plant near Edmonton. The CO₂ will then be used in EOR projects or injected into deep saline aquifers. One million tonnes of CO2 is roughly equivalent to the emissions from 182,000 passenger vehicles.

Capital Power is also involved in a similar project at the Genessee 3 power plant. Husky Energy has a project underway that captures CO₂ from its Lloydminster ethanol plant for injection into its nearby heavy oil fields. Arc Resources began injecting CO₂ at its Redwater oilfield in 2008. Although still in the testing phase, results have been encouraging.

To learn more about Carbon Capture and Storage visit the ICO2N and watch the videos Addressing Climate Change, Alberta Saline Aquifer Project – From Earth and Back Again and Safe Storage – Closing the Carbon Loop.

You Decide

The Department of Energy and Climate Change in the UK is challenging you to solve the problem of reducing the country’s CO2 emissions by 20 per cent of 1990 levels by the year 2050.

The data behind the 2050 simulation is based on actual UK data. You read along and learn about how the country uses energy and then decide how you see its future. The program quantifies your ideas and prompts further questions about the impact of your choices.

When you are done you get a snap shot of what your world looks like – again nicely quantified and easy to understand – including geography references, scale and scope of development that would be required, nod to efficiencies realized and a literal count of things like wind turbines and nuclear power plants that would be required. You can return to your musing and try again or submit the results.

But what we really like about this sim is that it’s the foundation for the Pathway Debate. Eight climate and energy experts have set out how they think the UK could meet the target using the 2050 tool. Brilliant. This is one of the best online tools we’ve seen recently to help consumers understand the relationship between supply and demand. It’s about the energy mix and how all of the sources work together to power the future. So hop to it and take a spin or should we say a sim.

Really, everyone these days is an energy armchair critic, picking winners and losers and thinking they have a better idea. Now it’s your turn. You decide. And you just might learn something in the process.

Keep the Sun Shining

It’s been a while since Flow tackled the issue of geo-engineering — the theoretical science of not just reducing our emissions to address climate change, but actively trying to change the climate. Perhaps because the proposed technologies are nearly all as drastic as you’d expect from a science based on literally engineering the planet — installing CO2 “scrubbing” air filters, encouraging CO2-consuming algae blooms — geo-engineering doesn’t often get a lot of attention. But now, one geo-engineering solution is getting a nod from none other than the United Nations itself, in the form of a proposed ban on any technology designed to block the sun.

While it’s easy to notice the oddly super-villain-like tone of a ban on massive orbital sun-blocking technologies, it’s also important to remember that any effective geo-engineering solution would necessarily involve the whole world. Allowing one country to unilaterally control the world’s climate would be an issue of national security.

The body responsible for this discussion is the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity, which has already issued another geo-engineering-related directive limiting the use of iron in the ocean as an algal fertilizer.

Solar energy is a phenomenal source of energy, with the Earth receiving a full 1.8×1014 kilowatt-hours of energy. According to the World Energy Council: “if only 0.1 per cent of this energy could be converted at an efficiency of only 10per cent it would be four times the world’s total generating capacity of about 3,000 [gigawatts].”

Rogue nations with massive mirrors and geo-engineering enthusiastic alike, beware:
We’re watching you.

Via Popular Science

Concrete CO2 reduction

When businesses trying to reduce their emissions talk about concrete results, they’re generally not being literal. But for a pair of Spanish companies, Tecnalia and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), their recently patented technology will do almost exactly that: using the solid waste from thermal power plants in place of limestone.

In cement production, limestone is heated up with other materials like clay, releasing the carbon dioxide from limestone to create calcium oxide, or quicklime. It’s this quicklime that is ultimately mixed with other materials and ground with gypsum to form cement.

By removing limestone from the process and replacing it with existing waste from thermal plants, which has been enhanced using nanomaterials, both energy and cement production benefit from recycling. The release linked above also boasts that the process reduces the energy required in the process by 50 per cent.

Of course, reducing the CO2 emissions from one industrial activity doesn’t exactly make the process emission-free. In Canada, despite our heavy use of hydro power, thermal power accounts for about 23 per cent of our total electricity production. Electricity production, in turn, is responsible for about 22 per cent of the country’s CO2 emissions.

Still, any technology that makes better use of the waste these plants are producing anyway makes sense in the short term. According to The Cement Association of Canada, the cement industry currently accounts for 1.4 per cent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Everyone wants to see concrete results on our environmental record, because the future of our planet is heavy, heavy stuff.

A Bright Idea: Keeping Things Dim

Since most of us aren’t ready to pack up our belongings and pitch a tent in the middle of the wilderness, the steps we take to reduce our environmental impact tend to be small ones. Government websites like the Office of Energy Efficiency provide a host of energy-saving tips like choosing low-energy lighting fixtures and checking the insulation on our windows, but these tips are still part of a recognizable pattern of energy consumption.

Even carbon offsets, those “get out of jail free” cards of the greenhouse gas world, aren’t 100 per cent effective in reducing emissions — The Christian Science Monitor published a damning six-part series in April 2010 that outlined many of the failings outlined in a similar report by The Suzuki Foundation and Pembina Institute.

But if the steps we’re taking are small, there’s at least some hope that they’re at least larger than we’d thought before. According to a study published in this month’s Energy Policy, the US government (and, therefore, likely the Canadian government as well) may have underestimated the CO2 emission savings of reducing electricity use by as much as 60 per cent. Because plants that burn fossil fuels are generally more able to respond to changes in use than their lower-emission counterparts (nuclear and renewable), lumping the two categories together skews the data. The authors recommend dividing electricity generation between low and emission-free sources and more variable, higher carbon sources, to give a more accurate picture of exactly what volume of emissions are being released.

Precisely estimating the volume of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continues to be one of the largest problems when trying to estimate the environmental fallout from human activity. The environment is still an incredibly complex system that has both surprised us with its ability to process our emissions, and shocked us with the rapid effects of climate change, such as ocean acidification. It’s hard to get a firm grasp of the large picture, which might explain why we tend to want small changes that we can make in our daily lives. So, knowing that the small might not be so small after all is definitely good news.

Via Science Daily

A Little Leak

The Alberta Government has invested two billion into carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, hoping to sequester the province’s emissions deep within the earth. As one of the only provinces to rely heavily on coal-generated power (Alberta currently has nine coal-fired facilities), and one whose economy relies heavily on oil and gas, this sequestration is an essential part of the province’s overall energy strategy.

In the province, the University of Calgary, in particular, has made a name for itself in the field. Its research is coordinated by the Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy (ISEEE). The ISEEE also provides a central online location for its own reports and others’, exploring the complex issue.

According to the university’s researchers, the Wabamun Area CO2 Sequestration Project (WASP) demonstrates that the costs of injecting CO2 and storing it in geologic formations are relatively low — about $3 per tonne of carbon dioxide. The cost to capture the CO2, pressurize it and transport it from the site where it was generated, however, would be about 10 times more than the cost of storage.

But beyond costs, one of the biggest questions about CCS technology is whether it can permanently sequester CO2. Obviously, if the CO2 leaks out, the entire point of the exercise is moot.

But just how much leakage is too much? That number, it turns out, is very small: one per cent.

According to research published in Nature Geoscience, unless CO2 leakage can be kept below one per cent of the reserve per year, CCS will not be able to mitigate the effects of climate change, such as rising sea levels and ocean acidification.

The severity of a one per cent leak decrease as the periods of time increase (from years to decades to centuries), but such a leak wouldn’t actually be problem-free until the thousand-year mark. It’s a huge span of time, but when it comes to waste disposal of any kind, we’re definitely talking about the long haul.

Algae key to reducing CO2

Pop quiz, hotshot: what do you know about algae farms?

Algae multiply at top speed, reaching maturity at three days, and they suck up CO2 like a floating rainforest. Also, algae farming may be an eco-friendly carbon offset solution. One football field end zone of algae can produce the equivalent biodiesel of three entire football fields of soybeans.

It’s still barely past the “good idea” stage, but algae farming has a foothold in warmer climates like Australia and the Southern US.

So why not Canada? Well, beyond the restrictive and chilly northern climate, there’s also concern about footprint. The average pond with algae life in it is about 28 cm deep; to mass-cultivate it would require a lot of space. You also have to use the right strains of algae to combat the right kind of pollutants…and there are an estimated 30 to 150 million of them.

Innoventures Canada (I-CAN) wants to find a way to make it work. In order to get past the aforementioned roadblocks, they have come up with three possible solutions:

• Algae Greenhouses. It’s not as efficient as a pond, but some algae-growers use small bags. However, the size and cost of the bags is limiting, so I-CAN is combining these by creating a larger-format closed system, in the form of a covered pond.
• Deeper Ponds. A metre-deep pond takes up less space, but creates issues with light penetration; algae need sunlight. I-CAN is currently exploring lighting options.
• Research. The Alberta Research Council has already been performing research for about two years to find out if this process is even feasible. I-CAN believes it’s worthwhile – if Canada finds the right strains, the information could be sold.

The overarching idea is to create these farms near industrial areas causing CO2 emissions so a symbiotic relationship can ensue. Algae require the CO2 and the warmth generated by industrial facilities, and industry could extend its lifespan.

Even when algae die, it’s still useful.  Its oil can be rendered and removed, and the leftovers are suitable as fertilizer or biofuel. Why didn’t we think to harness this resource sooner?

Spring cleaning for your car

You’ve been reading lots about how to make your home and office more energy-efficient for the summer. But did you stop to consider how you go from one to the other?

Most North Americans drive to work – it’s just the way things are. While we’re generally aware that driving produces greenhouse gas emissions, we’re not as aware that it could be less.

There are those who believe driving faster is actually better for the environment. Their thinking is that by going faster, the car’s engine is running (and thus polluting) for shorter periods of time. Those people are quite, quite wrong.

While different vehicle reaches optimal fuel economy at different speeds, it’s generally accurate to say slower means greener. Fuel efficiency in most cars decreases rapidly at speeds above 96 km/h, or 60 mph.

Anything faster not only burns more fuel, but more money.

Another way to “green” your car is better planning. The average distance driven per person has increased 36 per cent in the past 15 years. This can be greatly diminished by combining trips. Less fuel is expended on one two-stop shopping trip than two single-stop trips – partly because less distance travelled, but also because cold engines burn more fuel.

Many other easily-adjustable factors affect fuel economy. Generally speaking, slow and steady is not only safer, but greener.

By going easy on the brakes and gas pedal, avoiding hard accelerations, reducing time idling and unloading unnecessary items in your trunk to reduce weight, you can burn much less gas, and produce significantly less CO2.

An environmentalist, an oilman, a politician, a journalist and a rock star walk into a bar…

If Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology was a rock star, just what kind of rock star would it be… a notorious rock star or a renowned rock star? Will CCS be famous for being famous, a feat that often draws sneers from the musical elite, or will it stand the test of time and go down in the books as “the real deal”?

This year, FLOW has been following the CCS debate while the technology continues to make rock star status among industry, major politicians and media in North America. Since we labour under the assumption that the rock star is an apt analogy as the technology deals with underground rock formations, we’d like to explore this question further.

As a preamble, CCS is defined by the Alberta Government as “capturing carbon dioxide emissions from industrial sources and transporting them by pipeline to sites where they are injected into deep rock formations for permanent storage.” CCS technology can also be used for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) where CO2 is pumped underground and used as a solvent to lessen the viscosity of the oil, allowing it to flow more freely from hard-to-reach places.

In a January FLOW article we explored the different sides of the CCS debate and discovered a range of different attitudes towards CCS that changed markedly from profession to profession. We noticed that environmental groups in particular are hesitant to buy the T-shirt.

“It’s an unproven technology,” said Jeh Custer, Northwestern Energy Campaigner with the Sierra Club. “To think that we’re going to take carbon and put it under the ground and it will be there for hundreds or thousands of years seems overly reliant on technological solutions.”

Industry players, of course, are singing a different tune. And who could blame them? CCS technology represents a means to curb greenhouse gases without cutting down production. It could be used for oil sands, fertilizer production, coal plants, multiple emitters, single emission sources, you name it.

Politicians, as of late, seem to be big fans of CCS. Soon after Barack Obama’s visit with Stephen Harper in February, Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt came to Calgary to announce $140 million in funding going to eight CCS projects in Western Canada. In a March FLOW article, these eight projects represented a microcosm of the greater CCS puzzle in which various facets of the technology are applied in different situations and on a commercial scale. Among Raitt’s glowing reviews of CCS, the Minister said, “I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the importance of this technology… We can’t turn our backs on the energy and the wealth that our fossil fuels generate, but we have the responsibility to make sure it is generated sustainably.”

So judging by environmentalists, we’re dealing with a notorious rock star – famous in an unfavourable light. Judging by politicians and industry players, CCS rocks.

But what about media?

Media have clearly had some mixed views about it. The best way to capture this is through an example of two different media outlets covering the same CCS story.

A paper published in the April 2 issue of journal Nature revealed the findings of a study in which scientists observed nine gas fields that had been naturally filled with carbon dioxide millions of years ago. The study was meant to see how long the natural CO2 had been there. Of course, the crux of the CCS argument is the assumption that CO2, once pumped underground, will stay there forever.

Article A was entitled ‘Greenhouse gases stay buried for millions of years, say scientists’. OK, so far so good. Article B was entitled ‘Nature’s underground carbon stores aren’t rock solid’. Sounds like a pretty mixed bag of attitudes towards our rock star.

While we’re on the topic, we might as well explore what each outlet had to say about the study. The first article suggests the new research may present “the strongest case yet for an emerging technology.” The article briefly mentions CCS skeptics’ concern about its long-term environmental effects, and then outlines the results, saying, “they found the gases have stayed in underground pools of water for eons.” The article also touts the research as “being hailed as the first study to actually show how carbon dioxide is stored in natural-gas fields.”

Article B, on the other hand, essentially demotes the “rock” in our rock star to just a bunch of fizzy water. It means that, since CO2 is more readily absorbed by water than rock, it could eventually leak to the surface as water sometimes does.

Werner Aeschbach-Hertig, Heidelberg University researcher is quoted in the article as saying, “Clearly, mineral trapping is the preferable pathway, as it promises to store the carbon over geological time scales.”

So much for storage.

But maybe we shouldn’t jump to such quick conclusions. If you think about it, the concept of storing natural gas is a proven technology. For decades companies have been pulling natural gas from the ground and putting it back for storage when prices and demand go down. Natural gas is similar to CO2, so who’s to say the same scenario wouldn’t work in a carbon sequestration context?

Granted, Article B does dedicate a few paragraphs to show how these findings do not necessarily mean the end for CCS. “CO2 has been stored in these fields, in some cases, for millions of years,” said the study’s co-author, Sherwood Lollar, in the article. “So obviously, the very fact that it’s dissolved in water doesn’t necessarily mean it’s any less effective a storage mechanism than mineral precipitation.”

So we went from rock to water, but at the end of the day is CCS technology all just a bunch of hot air? This actually leads us to the most important question one should ask if we are going to compare CCS to a rock star. Is it a talented rock star? Meaning, is it good at what it purports to do?

Unfortunately, we can’t answer that question until we give this technology the time, money and resources for research. As far as using CO2 for enhanced oil recovery, this is a known and proven technology, as exemplified by the Weyburn-Midale CO2 Project in southeastern Saskatchewan.

As far as getting the CO2 to sit underground and stay put, there is ample evidence that suggests it can be done but we’ll never truly know unless we try.

And that’s precisely the point for all CCS advocates. Even the rock star could tell you, practice makes perfect.

CCS technology – smaller pieces of Canada’s big green puzzle

While some are still puzzled by carbon capture and storage (CCS), increased funding is allowing industry to test various pieces of the technology in order to get a clearer view of the big, emissions-reducing picture. Various projects underway throughout Alberta, BC and Saskatchewan represent a broad spectrum of CCS applications and, this week, after receiving funding from Natural Resources Canada, eight of them got a little closer to realizing their vision.

On March 26, the Honourable Lisa Raitt, Minister of Natural Resources, came to Alberta to announce a government investment of $140 million towards eight CCS projects chosen out of 39 proposals submitted last year for the $230-million ecoENERGY Technology initiative.

The eight winning proposals were selected to represent an array of different CCS approaches, from CO2 storage in geologic formations to using CO2 in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) projects. According to Raitt, each proposal demonstrated a different, complementary piece in the greater challenge of bringing CCS to wide-scale commercial use.

Understanding the viability of capturing and storing carbon emissions was a particular topic of concern in 2008 when the Alberta government announced it would invest $2 billion toward CCS technology. Concerns ranged from the feasibility of implementing such an expensive technology on a mass scale, to the environmental impacts of burying CO2 without getting to the root of problem and reducing fossil fuel use all together.

“I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the importance of this technology,” said Raitt during Thursday’s announcement at Calgary’s SAIT Polytechnic. “We can’t turn our backs on the energy and the wealth that our fossil fuels generate, but we have the responsibility to make sure it is generated sustainably.”

The investments were also touted as a supporting initiative to Canada’s Economic Action Plan, which will include $2.4 billion worth of new measures to support Canada’s climate change objectives.

“While we’re doing better than a lot of others, we’re certainly not immune,” said Raitt, of Canada’s economy as it compares to the rest of the world. Raitt was forthright in her belief that Canada’s robust fossil fuel sector is largely responsible for Canada’s more salubrious economic position on the global stage.

“Without energy, economies do not grow. They don’t even move… we’re still far from replacing the energy fossil fuels provide [so] we need to find a cleaner way to produce it and consume it.”

Successful proposals were submitted by partnerships led or co-led by ARC Resources, Enhance Energy, Spectra Energy Transmission, TransCanada, TransAlta, Husky, Enbridge and EPCOR. Each of the projects will receive between $3 million and $30 million of federal money, but Raitt stressed the federal funding is only one part of the larger equation. “We need to have collaboration between governments and between government and industry,” Raitt said.

Among the eight winning companies present at the announcement was Alberta’s Enhance Energy Inc. whose project proposes to capture CO2 from a large fertilizer plant as well as an oil sands upgrading operation. The CO2 would then be transported and injected into mature oil reservoirs in central Alberta for EOR and permanent sequestration.

“The funding will allow us to accelerate implementation of the project,” explained company president and engineer Susan Cole, adding that the Alberta Industrial Heartland based project, has been in the working for four years. “The added financial support will allow the company to bring this initiative to commercialization faster,” said Cole. (diagram above: Enhance Energy)

To date, the most notable example of CO2 being used for EOR, is Saskatchwan’s Weyburn-Midale CO2 project in southeastern Saskatchewan, which is home to a depleted oil reservoir containing deep underground rock formations called saline aquifers. Transported via pipeline from a plant in Beulah North Dakota, pure streams of CO2 left over from the coal gasification process are injected into these underground formations to increase the recovery rates of sticky, stubborn oil in hard to reach places.

So how does Enhance Energy’s project complement projects already using CO2 for EOR? According to Cole, it will demonstrate the feasibility of a single network to collect CO2 from a large number of industrial emitters. It is projected that within five years, this project could capture and sequester up to 1.9 megatonnes of CO2 annually, equal to taking 358,000 cars off the road each year.

“Each of the projects really is quite different,” said Doug Bloom, President of Spectra Energy Transmission West. The company’s Fort Nelson, B.C. project presents yet another challenge of CCS technology – testing the injection of sour CO2 into these deep saline formations for permanent storage. “In our case, we’re a natural gas pipeline. Raw natural gas contains high levels of CO2 and sulphur dioxide and we want to test the feasibility of permanently storing it in deep underground formations.”

As various parts of the CCS puzzle come into sharper focus, industry and governments across the world remain aware that the technology represents only one part of the even larger puzzle of environmental sustainability. As one environmentalist said in an earlier FLOW article about CCS technology, “there is no one green bullet.”

When asked by one reporter if Canada has a “plan B” for meeting reduction targets, Raitt replied that she doesn’t view CCS support in terms of a plan A or a plan B, calling it a scientifically viable solution in fossil fuel emissions mitigation. “We’re well on our way,” said Raitt adding that the ecoENERGY Technology initiative includes funding research on renewable energy and energy efficiency.

The funding announcement also coincided with the province of Alberta being recognized for its great strides in CCS research by The Aspen Institute, a U.S. energy and environment organization. The Aspen Institute awards recognize organizations for excellence in innovation, implementation and communication of energy and environmental solutions.

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