Carbon capture and storage schemes take shape with a $2 billion Alberta government incentive

The logistics and costs associated with carbon cleanup slowly come into focus

By Bill Sass

May 01, 2009

There is hope to develop other technologies that are more effective and can recover the same amount at a lower cost, he says.

From Enbridge’s standpoint, the capture technologies are specific to each customer’s individual industrial processes. “They would be part and parcel of coal-fired plants. They would be part and parcel of the upgrader and refinery facilities.”

So Enbridge and ASAP won’t be involved in the capture process. Enbridge and other companies will be involved in the transport, Szmurlo says, and the ASAP consortium’s focus will be on the sequestration side of things – injecting it into the ground and making sure it stays there.

“We would monitor, measure, verify the dispersion of the plume and make sure it’s down there under the ground doing what we think it’s going to do and that it stays there forever. Ideally it will sit there the same way oil and gas just sat there for hundreds of millions of years.”

So what happens to the carbon dioxide as it whiles away eternity? “Some of the saline aquifer would absorb the carbon dioxide and you would get sort of a sparkling salt water,” says Szmurlo.

“Some of it would mineralize and become a carbonate stuck in the pores of the reservoir and wouldn’t go anywhere because it would become part of the rock. Some of it would remain within the water and move around with it. Some of it would remain as a liquid CO₂. It would probably migrate in the same direction as the water migrates and it would gradually be absorbed by the water.”

Another problem – a barrier to establishing a viable capture and storage process – awaits a solution by lawmakers and regulators. Clear, concise guidelines and regulation as to who is ultimately responsible for the system have yet to be established.

“We think we’ve made a lot of progress on that,” Szmurlo says. “Things haven’t been finalized, but the model that’s being advanced – and I think that’s been well-received – is the operator of the sequestration site would, of course, be responsible for their operations while they were operating it.”
Other rules would be set up for different stages of the operation under the model.

The pore space would be owned by the Crown and leased by the operator for the purpose of storing carbon dioxide.

When the operations cease, and it’s been demonstrated that the industry understands where the carbon dioxide is going, “which would undoubtedly be the case after 20- or 30-year operating life of these projects,” then the Crown would embrace the long-term liability associated with this.
The government has indicated it wants to move CCS from the proposal stage to the operating stage as quickly as possible.

“It’s our intent that, whoever becomes the beneficiary of the Alberta government program, the ASAP consortium would undertake the deep saline aquifer component of the sequestration,” he adds. “We want to make sure we just don’t stop at a study.”

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