Progress Report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage

the North Sea where Norway’s StatoilHydro strips carbon dioxide from natural gas with amine solvents and disposes of this carbon dioxide in a deep saline aquifer. Since 1996, Sleipner has stored about one million tons of CO2 a year. A second project in the Snohvit gas field stores 700,000 tons per year.

The Weyburn project is currently the world’s largest carbon capture and storage project. Started in 2000, Weyburn is located on an oil reservoir discovered in 1954 in Southeastern Canada. The CO2 for this project is captured at the Great Plains Coal Gasification plant in Beulah, North Dakota, which has produced methane from coal for more than 30 years. The first phase finished in 2004 and demonstrated that CO2 can be stored underground at the site safely and indefinitely.

Future Projects

A major Canadian initiative called the Integrated CO2 Network (ICO2N) is a proposed system for the capture, transport and storage of carbon dioxide (CO2). ICO2N is an alliance of 15 largest Canadian industrial companies and the Canadian Government. The Alliance has been in existence for two years.

The ICO2N alliance has the stated objective to be the “world Leader in the implementation of Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage.” Its goal is to remove 60% of Alberta CO2 emissions and also to enhance oil recovery from mature oil fields. The first phase of operation is planned in 2012-2015.

In October 2007, the Bureau of Economic Geology at The University of Texas at Austin received a 10-year, million subcontract to conduct the first intensively monitored, long-term project in the United States studying the feasibility of injecting a large volume of CO2 for underground storage. The project is a research program of the Southeast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (SECARB), funded by the National Energy Technology Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The SECARB partnership will demonstrate CO2 injection rate and storage capacity in the Tuscaloosa-Woodbine geologic system that stretches from Texas to Florida. The region has the potential to store more than 200 billion tons] of CO2. Physical work started in

late 2007.

FutureGen was a US government project announced by President Bush in 2003 to build a near zero-emissions coal-fueled power plant to produce hydrogen and electricity while using carbon capture and storage. In December 2007, Mattoon Township, Coles County, Illinois was chosen as the site for the plant from among four finalists in Illinois and Texas. Sadly, on January 29, 2008the Department of Energy announced it was withdrawing funding from FutureGen, effectively terminating the project. The Department of Energy has stated that the demonstration was canceled because costs had escalated to .5 Billion and it did not believe a demonstration of the technology was now needed. The DOE has asked for existing power plants to submit proposals to be fitted for CCS to be up and running in the 2015-2016 timeframe.

Carbon Dioxide Capture Research

The capture of carbon dioxide is the most expensive component of the technology and is receiving the focus of the world researchers. UCLA’s researcher, Omar Yaghti, has developed ZIF materials which can absorb 80 times their weight in carbon dioxide. After absorption, the material can be decompressed and the CO2 released.

Research at the University of Texas in Austin, led by Professor Gary Rochelle, has developed a chemical process that will absorb carbon dioxide and release it when boiling the mixture. There are many other examples of these new technologies in research to capture carbon dioxide and for sure many others to be demonstrated.

Summary

Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage is a well demonstrated technology that is ready for large scale implementation. The cost of scrubbing exhaust gases or the pre burned fuel and the CO2 Gs compression will raise the energy costs between 40 to 60% over the unscrubbed and storged CO2 technology. There are scores of researchers working to develop materials that can absorb the CO2 gas in the smokestack and avoid the energy cost of scrubbing. These developments are at a minimum of seven to ten years away. We had best encourage this development, because it will be 10 to 15 years before their implementation after they are begun.

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