The UK Carbon capture and storage (CCS) association has published a lessons-learned report from the UK’s CCS program 2008 – 2015. The 36 page free download was issued following the decision of the UK Government to cancel its CCS commercialization program in 2015. The report found that a full-chain CCS project could have been delivered at Peterhead, using the Goldeneye store. But for the White Rose project at Drax to succeed would have required important adjustments to the terms of the program. It appears that the UK Government considers CCS as too costly and ‘there is no appetite from any developer to participate in a further UK CCS competition.’
The Carbon sequestration leadership forum (Cslf) met this month in Tokyo and has produced a 145 page report with updates from CCS initiatives in Australia, Japan, the US, UK and Norway. Japan’s flagship Tomakomai CCS demonstrator is now up and running and scheduled to sequester 100k tons/per year of CO2 through 2018.
The US Department of Energy has announced awards of $13 million to ‘quantify and mitigate methane emissions from natural gas infrastructure.’ The DoE has also selected eight new research and development projects to receive a total of $11.5 million in federal funding under its ‘Crosscut’ initiative. The projects include geothermal energy and CCS.
The CCS Cost Network 2016 Workshop held earlier this year at MIT has just published a 125 page Proceedings document. The workshop discussed currently available information on the cost of CCS and the outlook for future deployment. One interesting finding is the opposite commercial logic between US and Europe. In the US physical CO2 is sold and used in secondary recovery. In Europe, there are just ‘paper contracts of uncertain value.’
One oil that is playing the CCS game is Shell Canada whose Quest CCS project has reached a one-year milestone. Quest has captured and stored one million tons of CO2, about one third of the emissions from Shell’s Scotford Upgrader near Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta. Shell and its JV partners Chevron and Marathon have put the IT engineering plans for Quest into the public domain such that others can use them to build future CCS facilities.
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