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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.

Carbon counters love their work

Not all Albertans frown when the talk turns to carbon emissions. Christine Schuh lights up when she describes working on the cutting edge of adapting industry to the emerging new era of greenhouse gas control.

“I absolutely love this stuff,” Schuh says. “I think I’m actually helping the world. I’m using my skills. It uses a blend of things. I like creating solutions out of a blend of things.”

She has a mandate to channel out the trademark can-do personality of Alberta engineers in her role as leader of the climate change services group in the Calgary office of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. Her credentials as an associate partner in the accounting firm’s advisory services practice include two engineering degrees, industry experience such as working with mammoth stationary motors in natural gas field compressors, a PhD in environmental science and a teaching role as an adjunct professor at the University of Calgary.

Her seven-member group does what engineers like best: build. The team is laying foundations for new professional and business fields that combine engineering, science, financial auditing and law. The work has a pioneer flavor as an economic and technical frontier. “I’ve been doing this since 2001, and I’m probably one of the gray-haired people in the business,” Schuh says.

A dozen years after the Kyoto treaty served notice that greenhouse gases will be taken seriously by making the first stab at global emissions reductions, outlines of the new clean energy regime are starting to come into focus. The Alberta government has sharpened its rules, in keeping with declared intentions to anticipate developments rather than wait for clarity to emerge from slow and amazingly complicated international deliberations such as the Copenhagen climate change conference held in December by the United Nations.

As of mid-2009, Alberta tightened up regulation of carbon exhaust by industrial and public facilities. Before, the rules caught only very large operations with annual waste gas emissions equivalent to 100,000 or more tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. The change expanded policing to all sites venting 50,000 tonnes or more.

The reduced emissions tolerance still leaves personal energy consumers alone. But Schuh observes that the tighter regulatory mesh in the new version of the greenhouse gas dragnet catches relatively small facilities, at least compared to the jumbo targets of the original system, like coal-fired power stations and petrochemical plants.

The tightened regime potentially affects industrial sites as small as production batteries or clusters of heavy oil wells if they vent natural gas, which as methane is rated as about 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Large hospitals and universities also have to start thinking about their emissions under the new Alberta standard, Schuh says.

The regulatory net is expected to become steadily tighter. In Ontario and British Columbia, where the governments do not face such large-scale issues of economic and technical adaptation to carbon control as Alberta, the emissions ceiling is already down to 25,000 tonnes per year. Standards proposed at the federal level would set the bar as low as 3,000 tonnes per year, which could sharpen the focus of greenhouse gas policing down to single oil wells.

The goal of pioneer professionals in the fledgling field of carbon control is a system of environmental monitoring, measurement, record keeping, reporting and auditing that is as clear and reliable as financial accounting. The apparatus will be essential regardless of how governments eventually settle a heated global argument over types of standards, Schuh says. Trustworthy information will be required whether the new regime sets absolute limits on greenhouse gas emissions or uses less drastic “intensity” standards that regulate volumes of waste gas output per unit of energy use or production.

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