Expensive Commitment
Nothing comes cheap during the pursuit of a clean energy template
As Alberta’s technological formula for cutting greenhouse gas emissions with carbon capture and storage (CCS) goes into action, the policy’s costs are starting to show. Ironing out just a single wrinkle triggered an industry fund raising drive this winter.
“It’s one of about 150 things we have to move forward,” says Rob Craig, strategy director for the Integrated Carbon Dioxide Network (ICO2N). At forums provided by the Petroleum Technology Alliance Canada, he set out to raise $500,000 in cash and donated technical services to generate fine print required by emissions reduction planners.
The money will pay for a research effort titled the Alberta CO2 Purity Specification Project. The study will determine how dry, concentrated and free of impurities that carbon dioxide must be made to qualify for removal by pipelines and injection into underground disposal sites.
All CCS projects need product specifications in order to move off industry drawing boards and into implementation stages of design and construction, Craig says. “They need to understand what product they’re working towards.”
For disposal pipelines, purity standards affect key issues of steel corrosion, safety and operating procedures. In disposal sites, the nature of the product affects how it will behave in variable underground features and its chances of escaping from the natural geological vaults relied upon by the policy.
Above all, purity targets will decide how much equipment and expense will be required to create the key link in the planned disposal network — the capture of waste carbon dioxide at emissions sites. “In some cases raising purity increases capture costs exponentially,” Craig reports.
“There are no really cheap sources of large volumes.” Even the least costly opportunities that ICO2N has identified for use of the technology work out to about $50 per tonne of greenhouse gas. “We never developed any of our infrastructure in anticipation of carbon capture,” Craig says. “It’s a massive undertaking.” At coal-fired power stations, “the infrastructure you need is almost as big as the plant.”
At most industrial sites, carbon dioxide is thinly diluted in other gases such as nitrogen. The exhaust is also damp, contaminated with impurities like sulphur and vented at atmospheric pressure. Costs of compression for pipeline transport alone are about $20 a tonne, Craig reports. “The more you investigate, the more you find out needs to be done. The more you dig into it (CCS), unfortunately, the more expensive it seems to be.”
Potentially staggering bills for stripping greenhouse gas out of industrial plant exhaust are no surprise to government or industry experts. Digging deep into disposal issues began well before the 1997 Kyoto climate change treaty. The Alberta Research Council and Alberta Geological Survey started compiling a catalogue of underground storage sites in the province’s porous rock formations as international scientific work on carbon control gathered steam in the late 1980s. United Nations-sponsored action plans fostered practical engineering and economic studies into adapting Alberta’s fossil fuel industry.
The initial estimate of the price tag for relying on CCS to hit even relatively modest emissions reduction targets in the Kyoto agreement was an astronomical $10 billion a year. The figure emerged as the bottom line of the pioneer research in the field, a 2002 report by the Canadian Energy Research Institute (CERI). “The costs for this are comparable to those for nuclear or renewable energy options,” the report said.
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