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Global CCS Institute

Mapping a continent’s potential: North American Carbon Storage Atlas released | GCCSI

If a picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes, then perhaps the new atlas of North American Carbon Storage, might be worth a gigaton or two?

In a first-of-its-kind assessment of continent-wide storage potential, the North American Carbon Storage Atlas was released on 1 May 2011 at the 11th Annual Conference on Carbon Capture Utilization and Sequestration (CCUS) in Pittsburgh.

NACSA synthesizes data from Mexico, the United States and Canada to map out known geological storage reserves as well as the location of some 2,250 large stationary CO2 sources.

Tallying up all of the reserves, the report estimates the continent has at least 500 years worth of CO2 storage capacity, and as much as 5,000 years, based on current emission rates. The 500-year case estimates potential capacity of 136 billion metric tons for oil and gas fields, 65 billion metric tons for coal fields, and 1,738 billion metric tons for saline reservoirs.

“This new atlas provides the kind of fundamental information that, combined with technology innovation, can help fossil-fuelled facilities continue their essential energy role while reducing carbon pollution,” said Steven Chu, United States Secretary of Energy, in a statement.

“This initiative can also help identify opportunities for enhanced oil recovery projects that can further increase domestic oil production, enhance American energy security and support economic growth in states across the country,” Chu added.

Also being launched alongside the printed-copy of the atlas were the NACSA website and online viewer. In addition to maps of CO2 stationary sources and storage resources, the website also presents methodologies for estimating storage resources along with links to additional information.

Intended for a broad range of users, the online viewer also provides interactive access to the map layers and data used to construct the atlas.

The carbon storage atlas project has been produced under the auspices of the bilateral Canada-US Clean Energy Dialogue as well as a trilateral program under the North American Leaders’ Summit.

Global CCS Institute

Lessons form California’s daunting carbon challenge | Global CCS Institute

Among US states, California is leading the race to explore and implement ways to lower its greenhouse gas output. Its goal: to cut emissions to one-fifth of 1990 levels by mid century. As such, other states and nations are closely watching the Golden State’s practices for inspiration and technical guidance.

What then, if a deep, hard look at California’s ambitious plans to lower its greenhouse gas emissions revealed that – even by pursuing an all-out, no-holds-barred mix of today’s technologies and aggressive efficiency measures – the state was only likely to get about halfway towards its goal?

That, roughly, is the conclusion that Jane C. S. Long comes to in a commentary published in the journal Nature last October. Titled Piecemeal cuts won’t add up to radical reductions, her note maps out, with remarkable clarity, the mountainous challenge ahead for California to achieve its climate goal. The bracing conclusion: California can’t just spend or deploy its way to an 80 per cent reduction or beyond – and neither can anywhere else.

Jane’s expertise stems from her role as co-leader of a team of energy analysts who wrote California’s Energy Future: The View to 2050 published in May 2011. By day, she’s principal associate director at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a global leader in research on energy technologies and policy.

One of the important implications that surfaces in Jane’s broader analysis is the central role of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). This is somewhat surprising given that California’s grid is all but coal-free.

California is different from most states, she observes, with 40 per cent of total energy used for transportation, versus 25 per cent nationally. Thus CCS must come into play less so for grid power than to help generate low-carbon vehicle fuels and other applications where neither electricity nor biofuels can substitute for existing fossil fuels.

The model Jane and her team developed strives to avoid what she calls ‘sleights of hand’ where it can be difficult to fully account for the secondary or tertiary impacts induced by switching to new energy forms. For example, rather than simply count solar panels as clean generation, Jane’s model more fully enumerates the impact of electric power generation at night and other times when solar panels are off line.

The analysis reveals that to achieve a 60 per cent reduction – well short of the 80 per cent goal California and many nations are looking to – would require all manner of tough-to-imagine steps:

[The state would have to] replace or retrofit every building to very high efficiency standards. Electricity would have to replace natural gas for home and commercial heating. All buses and trains, virtually all cars, and some trucks would be electric or hybrid. And the state’s entire electricity-generation capacity would have to be doubled, while simultaneously being replaced with emissions-free generation. Low-emissions fuels would have to be made from California’s waste biomass plus some fuel crops grown on marginal lands without irrigation or fertilizer.

Given that California represents a best-case scenario for the rest of the US, Long’s assessment is a compelling case to accelerate the speed and scope of carbon-reduction efforts.

I’ll refrain from diving into the broader implications of her report here – better to check it out in whole. Instead, for the Global CCS Institute’s community, I wrote to Jane to tease out a bit more of her vision of CCS in California’s future. An edited version of our exchange follows.

Adam: You’ve said that CCS has a critical role in helping California achieve its goal of cutting emissions to 20 per cent of their 1990 levels by mid century. How so?

Jane: I would guess that CCS will not play much of a role in meeting the AB32 goals of 20 per cent reductions, but it may play an important role in meeting the longer-term goal of 80 per cent reductions by 2050. Natural gas generation is a large part of California’s electricity portfolio. If this is to continue and meet the emission reductions, CCS would have to be used whether or not that generation was within state or say, by wire from Wyoming.

In the long term, CCS may play a critical role in solving the fuel problem. We are unlikely to have enough biofuel to meet all of our demands for fuel even if we are successful in cutting demand in half through efficiency measures and electrifying everything we can. CCS could be part of a hydrogen scenario where we get hydrogen from methane and sequester the CO2 generated in this process. Or we might use biomass to make electricity and sequester the emissions to create a negative emission credit to counter the continued use of fossil fuels.

Adam: Yet CCS technologies remain immature and under-commercialized. Starting in what years would CCS need to begin entering into California’s energy mix to play this kind of role? And are we already behind that pace?

Jane: If we start now with demonstration projects, it could be possible to have all new fossil generation be using CCS within a few decades. We need that amount of time to be sure the demonstrations are working.

Adam: What lessons does California’s CCS case have for the transportation challenge in other countries?

Jane: The transportation problem in the developing world is really interesting because it’s not clear that countries like India, for example, should electrify automobiles as a first strategy. If their electricity is made with coal without CCS, electrification is not a clear benefit. If they move to de-carbonize electricity, then electrification of transportation and heat makes much more sense.

Adam: I’ve assumed that developing countries such as China and India ought to leapfrog to electric fleets ahead, and skip the oil-burning stage, to whatever degree possible. You’re suggesting that might not be the best bet for the climate?

Jane: The distance countries like China and India have to go to provide enough electricity at low emissions is huge. If having to run cars on electricity means they add twice as much coal-fired electricity without CCS it would be a disaster. As well, the biomass for biofuel problem is likely to be more acute in these countries as they face serious challenges with food supplies. In the same 2050 period that we are looking to more than double energy supply, we are looking to double food supply. As it takes some time to roll over the fleet of automobiles to electric vehicles, it probably makes sense to move forward with electric transportation at some level as this is what we need in the long term, recognizing it will make the need to decarbonize electricity even more acute.

Adam: Writing for the Institute, the Natural Resource Defense Council’s CCS expert, George Peridas, recently summarized California’s progress as “not a whole lot of progress on the CCS front to showcase since last year, but developments are expected soon”. How could the state reorder its CCS priorities to pick up the pace of technology development?

Jane: The state could get behind a demonstration project for a combined cycle gas plant. There are a lot of people skeptical about CCS. We need to have a concrete example that it works. A big issue in CCS is integrating all the complex industrial processes: electricity generation, capture, and storage. We need experience in actually doing what we theoretically ‘know’ how to do.

For an exploration of the broader report, along with further details on the technicalities of the model used in Jane’s analysis, check out Andy Revkin’s interview with Jane at his Dot Earth blog at the New York Times.

Global CCS Institute

With key contracts signed, Summit Power’s Texas CCUS project on track for July groundbreaking | Global CCS Institute

The Texas Clean Energy Project, a 400-megawatt, coal-fired plant designed to perform carbon capture, use and storage recently cleared two key milestones and is moving towards a July groundbreaking.

In February, TCEP inked a deal securing supplies of water and, on Valentine’s Day, the project announced agreements for engineering, construction and maintenance services for the new plant outside Odessa, Texas.

I’ve been keeping an eye on TCEP since last autumn when, on behalf of the Global CCS Institute I spoke with Laura Miller, the charismatic ex-mayor of Dallas who, after leaving public office moved to the Summit Power Group to help advance CCS solutions by becoming TCEP’s project manager.

TCEP is on track to be the world’s first integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) poly-generation facility, as well as one of the world’s cleanest coal-fueled power plants.

Summit Power’s Texas facility is designed to snare 90 per cent of the CO2 it generates, as well as 99 per cent of sulfur dioxide, 90 per cent of nitrogen oxide, and 99 per cent of mercury. Of the roughly 2.5 million standard tons of CO2 the plant will capture annually, about four-fifths will flow via pipeline to West Texas, where it will be shot into the ground to enhance oil recovery. TCEP’s remaining CO2 will be fed to a chemicals production facility to make urea, a feedstock for fertilizer.

Miller explained via email that of its 400-mw gross electric output, TCEP will sell 200 mw to a local utility (more on that below), about 85 mw will power commercial operations to make urea and compress CO2, and another 100 mw will be used internally to run project components.

Sited in Penwell, Texas, about 15 miles west of Odessa, TCEP is scheduled to come on line in 2015. If it can hit that deadline, the project will likely be the second US commercial CCUS facility to be sending CO2 to the oil patch: Southern Co’s 582-mw Plant Ratcliffe Project is currently under construction in Mississippi and is scheduled to fire up in 2014.

With a price tag of US$2.4 billion, TCEP is being financed mostly by private sources and has also been granted US$450 million from the Department of Energy’s Clean Coal Power Initiative.

The recent news: On 14 February, TCEP announced that it had signed engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contracts, as well as a 15-year operations and maintenance (O&M) contract for the new complex. According to a company press release:

The two, firm-price, turnkey EPC contracts that guarantee price, schedule and performance for the integrated coal gasification combined cycle (IGCC) project were finalized in December by the project’s three EPC contractors: Siemens Energy Inc.; Selas Fluid Processing Corp., a subsidiary of The Linde Group; and SK Engineering & Construction, a major Korean contractor. The total value of the EPC contracts is approximately $2 billion.

Selas Fluid Processing and SK E&C will supply a complete chemical block capable of producing syngas by gasifying Powder River Basin coal. A portion of the syngas fuels a Siemens power block, and the balance is used for the production of granulated urea. The chemical block captures 90% of the CO2 from the syngas and compresses the CO2 for sale to the mature, enhanced oil recovery (EOR) market in West Texas. The chemical block EPC contract also includes coal handling, coal gasification based on two Siemens SFG-500 gasifiers, gas cleanup, mercury removal, ammonia and urea production facilities, sulfuric acid plant, water treatment, CO2 compression, site preparation, plant buildings and other goods and services.

In the second EPC contract, Siemens Energy will supply a nominally rated 400MW combined cycle power plant capable of operating on syngas and natural gas. The power block is comprised of an SGT6-5000F gas turbine capable of operating on high-hydrogen syngas or natural gas. The power block includes an air-cooled condenser for plant cooling, which greatly reduces the water needed for the project, and a high-voltage switchyard.

A separate, 15-year O&M contract was also signed for the complete, turnkey operation and maintenance of the entire 600-acre facility, including day-to-day operation, and short term and long term maintenance. The contract, signed by Linde’s Gases Division, includes guarantees of performance and availability by Linde’s Gases Division and Siemens for the full 15-year contract period.

TCEP has cleared most of the other major milestones necessary to begin construction. It has signed a 25-year power purchase agreement to supply 200 megawatts of electric power to the municipal utility of San Antonio, CPS Energy. Whiting Petroleum Corp has agreed to a 15-year deal to buy the plant’s CO2 stream. And Summit has also signed a long-term deal with an un-named company to purchase the plant’s urea output.

Until recently, water supplies were an open question. Texas has been hammered by a millennial drought over the past few years. While the facility is designed to operate using minimal net amounts of water, securing water rights was a lingering challenge. TCEP tied up that loose end in February as well, Miller wrote, with a contract to buy “brackish underground Capitan Reef water” from a landowner west of the project. TCEP will pipe in the water and desalinate it on site.

So what next? Miller wrote to me that TCEP is hoping to close financial terms in June, and to break ground in July.

Before then, only one substantial hurdle remains. TCEP faces a frustrating glitch in the federal tax code, requiring the partnership to pay about US$150 million on its US$450 million federal grant. Summit Power is working with lawmakers to get an exception passed for the quirk. The effort is being led by US Sen. John Cornyn (R., Tex.) and US Congressman Mike Conaway (R., Odessa, Tex.).

Recently, the stakes got higher for TCEP’s success. Delays have slowed a similar project, Hydrogen Energy California (HECA), being planned for a sitebetween San Francisco and Los Angeles. As originally conceived, partners BP and Rio Tinto were working with the DOE to develop an IGCC facility, fuelled by a 3:1 mix of coal and petroleum coke, with full CO2 capture for enhanced oil recovery.

Last May, SCS Energy took over the project, and subsequently tweaked the design to also produce urea, similar to TCEP’s approach. According to an Energy Dept. source involved in the project, the revisions improve HECA’s economic viability and the project is currently progressing through front-end engineering design.

Writing for the Institute, NRDC’s George Peridas recently summarized the obstacles HECA has navigated:

After years of development, the project as we knew it came to an end. The price of power that was required to make the project viable (reported to be in the region of $300/MWh) was, unsurprisingly, not one that tickles the interest of local utilities.

Subsequently, the project changed ownership and management (from Rio Tinto/BP to SCS Energy) and is now undergoing design changes before proceeding with the permitting process afresh. Reportedly, these entail the co-production of fertilizer at the plant, and the use of out-of-state coal for the majority of its fuel needs.

It is not yet clear if and how fast the new version of the project will proceed, but we will likely know more in the coming months.

Global CCS Institute

A recipe to jumpstart CCS in the US – the rewards of collaborating with China, 3 of 3 | Global CCS Institute

This is the third and final installment of a Q&A with John Thompson of the Clean Air Task Force. Previously we talked about Canada’s leadership in CCS and the problems posed by focusing on CCS liability in advance of scaling the technology. In this last part of the Q&A, Thompson outlines his vision of the benefits available to the American CCS agenda by collaborating with Chinese utilities and oil companies.

For context on how quickly China is emerging as a hothouse of CCS pilots, a recent report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) estimated that China is home to nearly one-third of active pilot-scale CCS projects globally, many of which are focused on carbon use. China, after all, coined the term carbon capture use and storage (CCUS), notes BNEF, adding that China offers US utilities a test bed with lower labor costs, lower regulatory hurdles, ultra-fast construction timelines, ample capital, and an appetite to learn from the West.

To spur EOR, how can we bring down carbon capture costs?

There’s where we think China comes in. China has very low‑cost capture technology, but they have no or little EOR experience. Texas and the Gulf states have lots of EOR experience, but to get more oil from their mature fields will require anthropogenic CO2. We see a huge opportunity to partner with China here, to bring lower‑cost Chinese CO2 capture technology to the US. A bigger supply of lower-cost CO2 will in turn help capture more of our oil. In turn, we can export EOR technology back to China.

CATF recently hired a new staff person in Texas to develop this vision, Dr. Frank Chou. He’s a 30-year veteran of various refining and chemical companies, most recently Shell. Our aim is to develop links between China and the Gulf states region as a way to promote carbon capture in both countries. China builds projects at twice the speed of the US, and at a fraction of cost. If we can harness these global synergies, we have the potential to really drive down costs globally.

How far has this collaboration gone?

We’ve already brought AEP into partnership with Huaneng, and linked Duke with Huaneng as well. I mentioned Southern Co’s Plant Radcliff earlier: the technology there is a TRIG gasifier, developed in Mobile, Ala., by KBR and Southern Co. That technology is being built in China first, in a small, 120‑megawatt power plant about two hours from Hong Kong. That operational data will help refine the design as Kemper is built.

How has China become a leader in low-cost carbon capture?

We’ve all heard that ‘China builds one coal plant a week’. That may or may not be quite true at the moment, but they’re building at an incredible rate (see chart below), and much of the capacity is at the cutting edge of coal technology. They’re building an advanced coal gasification plant about once a month, where the US has only a handful.

It’s no different than China’s experience with factory manufacturing: there are economies of scale taking place that lower the cost to build advanced coal plants. For example, there’s a plant called Shidonkou, outside of Shanghai. They’re capturing CO2 at about $30 a ton. That same project in the United States would probably be double or triple that cost.

And then there’s the potential appetite in China for EOR. We estimate they have the potential, easily, to build 30 gigawatts of CCS capacity to supply EOR in China. Yet right now, there’s maybe only one EOR project there. With more know-how from the US, there’s huge potential for that number to grow.

But why would China be better able to solve the problem of scaling up carbon capture than here?

The math suggests that China may be able to build CCS on power plants using EOR with little or no incentives. In China, they refer to EOR-CCS as ‘CCUS’ where the ‘U’ is for utilisation.

Keep in mind the value of CO2 for EOR purposes is set by the global price of oil. So whether you’re in Texas, Norway or Beijing, you’re basically paying the same global price for oil and that price establishes the same economic value of the CO2 used for EOR regardless of where you are doing it. On the other hand, capture costs do vary by region and country and in China they’re a fraction of the costs elsewhere.

So, if you buy CO2 for EOR at roughly the same price in China and Texas, but your China capture costs are a third or half what they are in Texas, you may be able to do EOR‑CCS in China on power plants without any extra economic incentives, without any need for a price on carbon.

That’s not true in Texas yet, given today’s cost of capture. To develop power plant CO2 sources, you’re either going to need some kind of incentive or deep reduction in the cost of capture technology.

But we can lower capture costs with China’s help. We can harness that global synergy to scale up 30 gigawatts worth of CCS for EOR in China in a matter of years. That scale of development lowers costs of capture technology globally. Building that much CCS first in the West would take decades. China is a really significant strategic opportunity that we’re trying to exploit.

So a lot of what we’re trying to do in China is break down the barriers between Chinese CO2 suppliers and Chinese oil companies, because the oil companies have the knowledge. They understand the geology but they don’t produce the CO2. If we can create US-Chinese business partnerships, the transfer of technology both ways could take years off the time when CCS is widely deployed.

At the outset, I mentioned that for me, CCS can also mean ‘Copy Canada’s Successes’. Someday, it could also mean ‘Copy China’s Successes’ too. China could be the key to creating global synergies that allow us to develop CCS technology with little or no subsidies, and no price on carbon.

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A recipe to jumpstart CCS in the US – the liability barrier, 2 of 3 | Global CCS Institute

I started my three-part Q&A with John Thompson of the Clean Air Task Force by focusing on Canada’s leadership in CCS. In this installment, Thompson outlines the problems posed by focusing on CCS liability in advance of scaling the technology.

Outside of the Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana oilfields, questions over liability of sequestered CO2 have distracted the discussion, and arguably slowed or even stymied projects. Do you see liability fears as a barrier?

My bias has always been to deemphasize those things because, while important and necessary, they’re not urgent at this stage. As soon as you start getting the incentives and a few pilots off the ground, then the people that matter come to the table and start figuring out what really works and what doesn’t work, including for liability.

Liability risks are very important, but they’re second tier at this stage. It’s a chicken and egg problem: there isn’t a reason to worry about these risks if we can’t develop the technology. It’s like deciding, in 1914, what are the speed limits and color of signs for the interstate highway system.

I’m a firm believer that the regulations on this have to evolve as we learn from projects. We have much of the necessary expertise to get these right, again, with the EOR industry, which is very comfortable with liability.

So a lot of the things that we’ve done in the United States — Class VI rules for saline injection, we’ve done by learning from rules developed for Class II wells for EOR. Certain states have accepted liability while others that have chosen different paths — all that’s well and good, and will become more important and will evolve as soon as we get real projects on the ground.

Do you see a difference in the liability outlook for CCS in oil formations versus in saline injection?

There is an advantage for the first round of CCS development to put CO2 into old oil fields instead of saline sites. EOR provides certainty and revenue needed to finance projects. The likelihood is strong that the cap rock must be pretty good. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have oil there or natural gas in the first place. The issue is whether you’ve punctured that geology with old wells, and whether those old wells are closed properly and won’t become a pathway to the surface. Saline is critical too, but often less is known about the geology and so more studies are needed.

The allure of saline injections, presumably, is that the geology is more common, which would minimize the CO2 transport networks. Isn’t that a good reason to explore saline first?

The challenge with saline is that everybody who has a power plant or a large industrial source wants to minimize the pipeline costs and inject directly beneath their site. So how do you set up a system that actually begins to develop the best saline sites first and discourages people from, say, injecting under their own property where geology might not be as good just because it’s the least costly option?

One of the things that we think would be really helpful on the saline side is something we call a geologic storage utility. It would be a utility charged with handling the CO2 in a one or two‑state area and figures out where the best sites are first and helps build out the pipelines, so that we actually develop what’s easiest to characterize, and avoid black eyes.

Speaking of black eyes, given rising public opposition to natural gas hydrofracking in the US, do you worry about resistance to CO2 injection trials?

Resistance will depend on the site and the scale and a lot of other things, but the risk is rising. And certainly, the last thing we want is one failed site — a CO2 leak — to discourage the whole industry. To reduce resistance, people need to feel the project is safe. They need to believe it is worthwhile. This is a point where better education is needed. Quite simply, it’s game over for avoiding the worst aspects of climate change if CCS isn’t widely used. Fossil fuels use worldwide is projected to rise 50 per cent by 2035. CCS is effective because it can capture 90 per cent of the CO2 from stationary sources — new, existing, gas, or coal.

In that sense EOR can turn the CCS story into a potential success story – it helps recover more oil – shifting the focus away from worry over what CO2 does in the ground. Is the EOR potential big enough to drive significant carbon capture investment?

I think that’s really the interesting, fun fact here. Policymakers don’t necessarily understand that if you want to really reach the full potential of domestic oil production in the lower 48, particularly in Texas, and Mississippi, you’ve got to capture CO2 from power plants.

We’re running out of low-cost natural sources of CO2. To really develop the residual oil zones that are in the watery layers below the traditional producing wells, you need high volumes of CO2 and it will have to come from industry. Some of that will come from low‑cost sources such as natural gas processing and chemical manufacturer refineries. But ultimately, it’s going to take power plants.

Thanks John. We will continue our conversation tomorrow with a focus on the Clean Air Task Force’s plans to spur collaboration between the utilities and the oil sector in the US and China to accelerate the development of CCS.

Next…

  • A recipe to jumpstart CCS in the US: the rewards of collaborating with China – A conversation with John Thompson of the Clean Air Task Force (Part III)
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To jumpstart CCS in the US, look to Canada and China, 1 of 3 | Global CCS Institute

To John Thompson, CCS is an acronym with more than one meaning. To anyone in the Global CCS Institute’s community it means ‘carbon capture and storage, or sequestration.’ As director of the Coal Transition Project at the Clean Air Task Force, Thompson’s career is committed to accelerating the development of technologies to help cut greenhouse gas emissions from coal. He sees other possibilities for the three-letter acronym too.

On eyeing the progress being made by Canada, Thompson quips that the US might benefit if we took the acronym to mean ‘Copy Canada’s Success.’ He contends our northern neighbor has gotten the mix of incentives, policies, and industry concentration just right, so that programs are gaining momentum, at a time when US efforts are off-again than on-again.

China offers another variant of the acronym: ‘Collaborate with China’s System.’ Thompson sees huge potential gains for the US by collaborating with China, as its huge energy sector continues to binge new coal-fired power plants. With its deep capital resources, fast construction timelines, and willingness to demo cutting edge carbon capture systems.

My introduction to Thompson’s views came in New York last fall at the Institute’s roundtable for Climate Week. Intrigued by his vision of the promise of cross border collaboration, I spoke with him more recently at greater length to learn more about his take on CCS in the US, Canada and China. I’ve broken down our conversation in three parts. This first part, below, touches on US and Canadian efforts. In Part II, due tomorrow, Thompson opines on the barrier posed by a premature focus on CCS liability. In Part III, due Wednesday, he outlines an ambitious collaboration his organisation is developing between utilities and enhanced oil recovery (EOR) players in the US with their peers in China.

There is a lot of criticism saying that CCS efforts in the US are foundering. You’ve suggested we look to the north for a better way. Why?

It’s my version of CCS: ‘Copy Canada’s Successes.’ There are three things that Canada has done well that are key to making CCS work. One is incentives — the carrot part. For example, Alberta has put C$2 billion on the table to move a number of projects that will probably sequester about five million tons annually of CO2 by 2015. Some of those are going to break ground in 2012 or even this year.

The second thing: they’ve done regulations right, in a way that provides a reason to do CCS. These aren’t final, admittedly. But they’re taking shape. In the fall, Canada issued draft federal regulations that will set, for the first time, CO2 emission limits on coal plants. These rules set emissions at the level of an uncontrolled natural gas plant — so, call it a 65 per cent reduction. The key thing is you have to meet that standard whether you’re a new or an existing plant. But if you’ve certified that you’re going to put on carbon capture and storage, you can meet the new standard in 2025. That timing is important. It sets up an achievable standard — what I call a ‘partial capture’ level — and offers enough time to actually get the planning and construction completed. That’s a really good formulation that the US could learn from.

Then the third thing that they’ve done right is what I call the ‘nucleus’ of a CCS industry: the ICO2N network, which brings together coal, oil sands, and power utilities, all of whom have a strong interest in developing CO2 capture and storage in Canada.

What makes for a CCS nucleus area?

Look, this is no different than the car business. If you wanted to start manufacturing autos 50 years ago, you needed a lot of other industries assembled around you, to give you the component parts, the engineering services, and so on. It’s not quite a perfect analogy, but with CO2 there is a similarity.

For a one‑off CCS project, that’s an approach that can be done once, practically anywhere. But if you really want to do two or three projects, you need to create a community of skills and resources that is more sustainable, to build pipeline infrastructure, develop regulatory knowhow, nurture a critical mass of specialized engineers and geologists, and so on.

It’s the combination of incentives, rules, and an industry nucleus that make up the ‘secret sauce,’ so to speak, that we need to be replicated elsewhere around the world for CCS to thrive.

Some have said the US experience has suffered for being spread too thin, with projects in the South, Midwest and Northeast. Does the concentration of resources help?

Yes. Creating a density of projects in a certain area facilitates other things, like pipeline development, or developing regulations and regulatory expertise that enable projects to move ahead.

I think the Department of Energy has put forward something like US$8 billion over the years on CCS projects in various locations. But imagine if you had focused all that money, say, in Texas, where there’s a lot of EOR. You might have seen a faster, bigger bang for your buck. Canada, for its part, is concentrating more of its efforts in its middle section, though there are other projects farther afield.

Here in the US, we have a similar nucleus in the Gulf states, where oil and CO2knowhow are deeply rooted. What’s the potential there?

[We] just hired Dr. Frank Chou, a 30-year veteran of the petrochemical industry, in Texas to facilitate what we call the Gulf States-China Initiative. Think about Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas: they’re all places with either a lot of oil fields, a lot of EOR — or a lot of potential EOR — and a lot of expertise. You have many of the key resources in place, such as the Texas Bureau of Economic Geology. You have companies like Denbury that build pipelines. You have a billion tons of CO2 injected over the last 30 years in the Permian Basin alone. There is a lot of real, hands-on experience there, ranging from the drilling, to the pipeline, to the monitoring.

It’s interesting to look where US CCS integrated projects are happening at the highest rate. There was a lot of flurry in the Midwest, initially, over the last 10 years, but it’s really been places like Mississippi and Texas where the projects are actually breaking ground. You have the Kemper Plant in Radcliffe, Miss., Southern Co.’s 582 megawatt IGCC plant with 65 per cent capture that broke ground last December. And there’s Summit Power’s Texas Clean Energy Project, too, which looks to be on track to break ground next year.

Both of these plants are globally important. Kemper is a big deal: this isn’t a pilot-scale project. It’s the real deal, a full-scale IGCC plant, approved by the Mississippi Public Service Commission to be funded out of the utility’s rate-base. And, it’s selling the CO2 for use in EOR, via a pipeline being built by Denbury. Likewise, TCEP’s model is all about commercial viability, by converting some of the CO2 into urea and other chemical by-products, and selling the remainder of the CO2for EOR.

This ends part I of my chat with Thompson. Tomorrow he discusses how worries over liability of CO2 storage are putting the cart before the horse.

Next…

** For more on the Texas Clean Energy Project, check out my recent Q&A with Summit Power’s Laura Miller, who is championing the TCEP project.

Global CCS Institute

From fighting coal plants to fighting for carbon capture and re-use: Q&A with Laura Miller (Part II of II) | Global CCS Institute

Yesterday we heard the start of Laura’s story, and the progression of the Texas Clean Energy Project. This is the second and final part of the Q&A with Laura.

You have a competitor that’s following a similar technology path?

Yes, that’s Hydrogen Energy California (HECA). They’ve gone through a complete transformation. One of the original backers, BP, dropped out after the Gulf spill.

Like us, HECA also got Department of Energy (DOE) money as part of the Clean Coal Power Initiative. They got $408 million, we got $450 million. They’re also at 90 per cent capture. Their original design, I think, was using petcoke, rather than Wyoming coal.

When the project nearly died, in an effort to keep it alive, DOE went out and solicited other companies to come in and take it over. SCS Energy, in Concord, Massachusetts took over HECA in September.

I joked when I called the head of HECA because they have the same tax problem that we have right now in congress. I called the man who was negotiating to buy the project, the chairman of the company, and I said, “Hey, I hear that the project now is modelled after our project, that we have the same configuration,” and he said, “Yep. We like to tell everyone we meet that we taught you guys everything that we know.”

Is there sufficient demand for urea and CO2 to repeat this model in other facilities?

Right now, the United States imports about five million tons a year of urea and the US domestic production is 3.5 million. When we go online, we’ll be boosting urea domestic production by 20 per cent.

There’s obviously a finite amount of urea that can be produced worldwide, but the beauty of the syngas is that it makes lots of other products. You can make methane out of it, you can make ammonia out of it, you can make gasoline out of it. The Germans used coal gasification to fuel their entire war effort during World War II.

We picked urea because we did a very thorough look at the different markets for various products that could be made from a syngas and decided that urea was a profitable strong market because of this imbalance between domestic output and international production.

The plant has taken longer than you anticipated. What have been the delays?

We’ve had some shifts in the ownership of the project. Summit always builds for owners – so far, gas, solar and wind projects, never coal. We contract to do a turnkey power project, we build it, we hand over the keys, they give us a success fee, we move on to the next power project.

In this case, we developed the project and then Babcock & Brown became the owner of the project in 2008. But they had to give the project back to us because in the economic downturn, they went bankrupt and couldn’t afford to build it.

That was, obviously, a big setback and we kept the project going even though if we’d have been a gas plant, we just would have stopped working on it and moved onto the next project until we found a new owner and the economy improved.

But we have a strong philosophical belief that if coal’s going to be used in this country for power production in the future, it’s going to have to be done this way – in an incredibly clean way – and the time is now while the world is trying to find ways to reduce carbon emissions We decided it was worth holding onto the project because we thought we had a good business model and that if any of these projects was going to succeed, ours had a good chance to succeed.

Are you bearing the full development cost of the project now?

We added one key investor in the project, and it’s Clayton Williams out of West Texas. Had he not entered the project, we probably would not have been able to continue. He came in at a really critical time just before we got the DOE award, putting in money along with Summit.

Williams is a very colourful oil man in West Texas—a real character and a sweet man. He just turned 80, and he ran for governor against Ann Richards some years back.

Knowing oil, he immediately saw the value of the CO2. He understood how we put this together and how it could work and how it could be attractive to investors and so he became a minority owner.

Since then, we’ve talked to other investors, who will need to put up about $1 billion for financial closing. We have a checklist of things that these investors need to see in order to make their final decision and we’ve been, one by one by one, checking off all those milestones. Now we’re down to just a handful of things that need to be completed.

What’s done, and what remains to be completed?

Here are the milestones we’ve already passed.

We kicked off the front-end engineering and designing in June of 2010 and we finished it in July 2011. We got our air permit in December of 2010 with no opposition. That was a very big milestone for us.

We got our record of decision from the Department of Energy, which puts us in compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act. We have pre-sold all of the urea, CO2 and sulfuric acid. And we are about to sign our interconnection agreement that will connect our project to the state’s electricity grid.

What about the electricity?

Ah yes. Last but not least, we have sold all of the electricity to the city of San Antonio.

CPS Energy in San Antonio is the largest municipally-owned utility in the country, led by a CEO named Doyle Beneby. He’s been incredibly visionary in terms of where he wants the utility to go. He is shutting down one of his old coal plants early and buying all of our power, and building solar farms and wind projects.

Working with the mayor of San Antonio — who notably is the youngest mayor of a big city in the country, by the name of Julian Castro – they have joined up, so that every single power deal that they’re making is for green power, and includes an economic development component requiring companies they do business with to create jobs in San Antonio.

We, as an example, are opening an office in San Antonio for customer relations, and for media. And we’re forming a carbon management advisory board with environmentalists, industry experts and scientists on it, to be on the inside of our construction process so that they learn how the gasification process and carbon capture work. Then they can go out and tell people that clean coal with carbon capture does exist.

You’ve gone from fighting coal to selling a very complex coal project, and have been successful at both. How have you been able to sell others on the vision of this plant?

It can be difficult. It’s so funny. I was at a dinner party and someone asked me what I’m doing since I left being mayor, and I said, “Oh. I’m building a carbon capture power project that uses the carbon for enhanced oil recovery in the Permian Basin.”

The guy literally closed his eyes. And he said, “Oh. Wow. Huh.” and then he turned to a person on the other side of him to find more interesting conversation.

Whenever that happens, I always say, “But, I want you to know, I’m going to save the polar bears and make the planet safe for your grandchildren.” Sometimes that gets their attention.

The irony is that I’ve always been a communicator who used my communication skills to win journalism awards and get elected mayor of Dallas, but you start talking about gasification and compressed CO2 and everyone just goes to sleep on you.

It can be too abstract for the public to connect with. How do you get around that?

When I was fighting TXU’s big coal plant proposal, I kept losing in all these debates with them because they’d bring their engineers in to talk about how coal gasification didn’t work, and carbon capture didn’t work.

The most important thing I did at that time was to go to Tampa, Florida, where I had been told there was an advanced IGCC – gasification — plant operating. I had to fly there to go touch the plant, to be able to come back to Dallas, and stand up to them in the debates and say, “You are not being truthful. Gasification works, and it’s working in Tampa, Florida, and I saw it.”

They said, “Well, but that plant has a history of problems. And they use a very specific high-quality Appalachian coal. It’s the only kind of coal that can be used in gasification, and otherwise it just doesn’t work.”

So I said to them, “Really? Well, look at this,” and I opened my hand in the debate to show what looked like a shiny, black rock. I said, “Since you keep telling me this, the first question I asked the plant manager in Tampa is what kind of high-quality Appalachian coal do you use? He said, ‘We use pet coke from Houston”.

Then, I turned to the audience, and I said, “That’s basically sludge off refineries in our own backyard.”

So then the debates turned because then people said, “Oh my God, they haven’t been telling us the truth about what’s technologically available.”

My point is that offering real-world examples – when people can go and see and touch the cleanest coal plant in the world, which ours will be – it will really move the debate. Until then, it’s just conversation.”

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From fighting coal plants to fighting for carbon capture and re-use: Q&A with Laura Miller (Part I of II) | Global CCS Institute

Laura Miller seems an unlikely champion for a project that’s on track to become the first financially self-sufficient carbon capture and sequestration project in the United States.

After all, it was only five years ago that Miller, then Mayor of Dallas, emerged triumphant in a David-vs-Goliath showdown with energy developer TXU to block the construction of 11 new coal plants in Texas.

Once Miller learned about the proposal that, along with seven others proposed, would double the number of coal plants in Texas, she cobbled together a coalition of three dozen cities, counties and school districts to block the deal. Following a marathon process, Miller’s coalition was instrumental in getting TXU to retreat from its plan. Embattled by critics, TXU became a buyout target as its stock dropped, and the new owners negotiated with national environmental groups to build eight of the 11 coal plants.

After her term, Miller was asked by a variety of environmental groups to carry the anti-coal flag. Convinced that simply obstructing new coal plants wasn’t a solution to the climate challenge, Miller instead went on a mission to learn about alternative technologies.

Her odyssey ended at Summit Power Group, a Seattle, Washington based developer that’s developing a carbon capturing, coal gasification power plant with a new kind of business model. Summit’s so-called ‘poly-gen’ plant will make money by selling CO2 and other by-products for multiple uses.

It will sell CO2 to the oil patch for enhanced oil recovery. And the plant will convert some of the extra syngas it produces into valuable chemicals. Taken together, Summit believes it can build and operate a coal plant with 90 per cent capture that makes money, without a price on carbon.

Miller has spent the past four years pushing plans to build the 400-megawatt Texas Clean Energy Project in Odessa, not far from the New Mexico border. When completed, TCEP will be the cleanest coal-fueled power plant in Texas.

In an era where cancellations of CCS projects in the US are outnumbering successful start-ups, TCEP has come a long way. Despite the bitterly polarised politics around energy, Summit’s $2.4-billion project won bi-partisan support in Texas’ state-house.

Its secret? Summit’s process offers something to supporters of both green energy and fossil fuels. It captures and reuses CO2 emissions, which pleases the Greens, and it sells the CO2 to the oil industry, which boosts oil recovery from ageing wells. In December, TCEP was granted an air permit with no opposition.

In September, Miller and I met in New York. She was in town for ClimateWeek, where she took part in a roundtable discussion hosted by the Global CCS Institute. More recently, we caught up for a longer talk about her project. What follows is Part 1 of our conversation. Part 2 will be published tomorrow.

Would you characterise your personal transition as one of being anti coal to pro coal within certain conditions?

When I left being mayor, the environmental community asked me to go out and teach other mayors how to fight dirty coal. And I said, “You know, I think it would be more worth our while to go out and build the cleanest possible coal-fuelled plant in the world and then raise the bar”.

So for four years, all I have done is work on what we believe and what a lot of the environmentalists believe is going to be the cleanest coal plant: 90 per cent carbon capture, extremely low emissions on all the other pollutants.

Given recent cancellations of CCS projects in the US and Europe, your project is a stand out. What’s holding things back?

There’s a lot of uncertainty around where these projects fit in, which makes it harder for the private sector to move forward. Even some Greens are luke warm in their support for CCS, wanting to spend more time on promoting renewables. And a lack of popular conviction on climate issues means it’s safe for politicians to go slow.

In the face of this indecision, our saviour is really enhanced oil recovery. There’s a growing appetite for the CO2 in Texas and other oil-producing states, regardless of climate discussions, or a price on CO2.

We have the ability to take all this CO2 that we can capture off the industrial projects and sell it to bring more oil out of the ground out of wells that already exist.

Summit was awarded $450 million from the DOE to scale up this process, and one of the reasons we got the award was because of our financial model to sell CO2 and other products.

Are you vulnerable to the backlash against renewables energy funding simmering in the US Congress?

Four years ago, when we proposed this project, we had no plans and no need to ask for any federal money because we had a good business plan. Not only will we sell electricity, we’ll also get revenue from the CO2 we sell for enhanced oil recovery. And lastly, we also make a whole lot of urea fertiliser. We’re planning more than just a power project. We call it a poly-gen plant.

The focus of the renewable controversy right now is on a large government loan that was made to a company that took the money when it was financially troubled and subsequently declared bankruptcy. We, on the other hand, have a cost-share agreement for the $450 million in which we only get the money as a 50 per cent cost reimbursement after we spend private funds during construction.

And construction won’t begin in 2012 until all of the private money is committed up front. So there is no risk like there is with the loan guarantees. And at $2.5 billion in capital costs, the $450 million federal award only accounts for 18 per cent of the total cost of our project.

How long do you expect the project to take?

Back when I started I was optimistic that we could start construction within a year, by end 2008, or maybe 18 months at the most – but then, I knew nothing about the power plant construction business. Well, it’s four years later, and we really are close to being ready to break ground, but I’ve learned that things work more slowly in the power sector than elsewhere.

And there’s an irony here. Erle Nye, the former chairman of TXU — but who wasn’t responsible for the coal build-out I was fighting, that was his successor John Wilder — as soon as Erle heard that I was involved with this project, he said, “Babe…” — because he’s old school — “Babe, you’re a very impatient woman, and you’re going to be frustrated because building a power project takes a lot of patience, takes a lot of time.” And I said, “Oh, no, no. We’re going to get this done right away”.

So here I am, four years later. Erle occasionally sends me an email and congratulates me when we get another milestone for our project.

What are the roots of this project and of Summit Power?

Let me start with Summit. The brilliance of this project comes from Don Hodel and Earl Gjelde, who founded Summit Power Group. Don was Energy Secretary for Reagan, and Earl was his number two. Then Don became Interior Secretary and Earl was his number two there again. In time, they left Washington DC and started this company. Previously, they’ve built natural gas plants and solar and wind.

They were interested in figuring out a way to use coal for national security reasons. They knew, because they have built a lot of plants, that you couldn’t finance a power plant with very low emissions that also captures carbon. That’s been the weak link for other CCS projects, I think: they were proposed with the confidence that there would be a price on carbon, which would help CCS become financially viable.

But Earl and Don did not favour cap and trade or a price on carbon. Because they’re political conservatives, and from the start, they thought that you’d need to put together a business plan that is financially viable without that kind of safety net.

So the genius of this project, in my opinion, is that they came up with a financial plan that made this power plant more than just a provider of electricity. They wanted other revenue streams to make it more profitable.

They wanted to create multiple by-products that would bring the project maximum revenue.

How does the process work?

You take the coal, you make a syngas. Then, with the gas, you make multiple products. You burn the gas to make electricity, but you also take quite a bit of the syngas and make urea fertiliser. So you have a separate manufacturing facility on the site next to your power generation.

The process also removes almost all of the bad sulphur. And we’re using a low sulphur coal to start with. We capture more than 99 per cent of the sulphur and put that into a separate manufacturing facility on the site to make sulphuric acid, which is also sold. Sulphuric acid is used in the farming community and by industry.

Finally, we capture 90 per cent of the CO2 off the syngas, compress it into a liquid form and put that in a pipeline and move it to oil producers, who send it down into wells to drive out more oil.

How do the economics break down?

Originally, we modelled that the project would generate a third of its sales from power, a third from urea, and a third from CO2. But because the economy isn’t getting much better, and construction prices aren’t getting any lower, we’ve decided that we’d make a little bit less electricity and make more urea, to improve the financials of the project.

The shift means that we’ll boost urea output to 720,000 tons per year, up from 500,000. That will drive urea to over 40 per cent of our total sales.

The irony of all this, and the reason why it’s so hard to build a power plant that captures carbon, is because the least profitable revenue stream we have is from electricity. You get much better returns on your CO2 and your urea than you do on your electricity.

But the point of building this project is to show the world that you can build a power plant that captures this carbon. Hopefully, after these first few get built and people see that it’s possible to do a privately owned and funded project like this, you’ll see improvements in efficiency as you do with any new product, and this super-clean model will become the standard, and it won’t need any government assistance to be replicated worldwide. That’s the dream, and we are close to helping it become a reality.

Thank you Laura. We’ll pause here for now and return tomorrow with Part 2 of this Q&A.

Read part 2 of this interview here.

* Fighting Goliath: Texas Coal Wars is a film, narrated by Robert Redford, that documents the efforts by Miller and others to block TXU’s project. You can learn more about the documentary at FightingGoliathFilm.com, or view the full film here.

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Wedges reaffirmed: Robert Socolow updates his ‘wedges’ analysis of emissions reductions | Global CCS Institute

Remember ‘wedges’? For the broader public first learning about climate change – and even many energy industry insiders — back in the early 2000s, a single chart visualizing how the growth of global warming emissions could be reversed in ‘wedges’, helped to clarify the daunting complexity and scale of climate change.

That chart was created by two Princeton University scientists, Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, back in 2004 when they co-authored a paper in Science. The power of their interpretation — however simplifying — helped push forward the discussion of climate change into wider public circles.

Seven years later, Socolow has written an update to the analysis, reaffirming and intensifying the duo’s original message: that available-today technologies, including broadly-applied carbon capture and storage (CCS) have the capacity to reverse emissions growth. Socolow was stirred to re-visit his analysis because “[Our] core messages are as valid today as seven years ago, but they have not led to action”.

For CCS watchers, Socolow’s update is worth digging into for a couple of reasons. First, the exercise offers a grim reminder of how quickly the climate challenge is worsening. Where his 2004 estimate called for seven gigatonne-scale wedges of emissions reductions, Socolow’s update predicts we’ll need nine, if we started today, and it will take longer.

And, second, the muted response to Pacala’s ominous update is a worrying sign that the data is having less impact at a time when it should be attracting more attention. Pacala address why this is so, and how to respond.

To help illuminate both points, let me step back to review the content and context of the first paper. When the first wedges analysis was published in 2004, officials in the Bush White House were resisting climate change policy, making the argument that, even if the science is valid, there was no available technology to fix the problem.

Against this backdrop, the two Princeton scientists’ succinct paper, including the cannily clear ‘wedges’ analysis, made the case that, “humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problem for the next half-century,” as Socolow recently recounted.

Here’s his description of their methodology:

“In a widely reproduced figure, we identified a ‘Stabilization Triangle,’ bounded by two 50-year paths. Along the upper path, the world ignores climate change for 50 years and the global emissions rate for greenhouse gases doubles. Along the lower path, with extremely hard work, the rate remains constant. We reported that starting along the flat emissions path in 2004 was consistent with ‘beating doubling,’ i.e., capping the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration at below twice its ‘pre-industrial’ concentration (the concentration a few centuries ago).

The paper is probably best known for having introduced the ‘stabilization wedges,’ a quantitative way to measure the level of effort associated with a mitigation strategy: a wedge of vehicle fuel efficiency, a wedge of wind power, and a wedge of avoided deforestation have the same effect on the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Filling the stabilization triangle required seven wedges.”

Among some 15 or so other wedges that Socolow and Pascala mapped out, three looked to CCS for reductions on the order of one gigatonne per year, to capture CO2 at present and future plants generating baseload power plants, H2 and/or coal-to-synfuel.

To be sure, the graph had its critics. Charles Petit at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker reminds us why it was also so catalytic, so much so that it perhaps encouraged false hope about the ease of fixing this problem:

“It was oversimplified, but for goodness’s sake, that’s what your typical members of Congress and White House senior staffers require. Wedges, for a while, were the currency of climate mitigation conversation. Yet since then emissions have gone on shooting up. Some critics said the Princeton pair so simplified that task, however abstractly, that it got translated subconsciously as an easy job. And easy jobs don’t get emergency attention. Thus for mapping a route away from climate peril Socolow and co-author Pacala got pinned, by some, as a reason policy makers lost their fear and, without it, did hardly anything.”

(To wit, earlier this year, Socolow was drawn into a brouhaha when a blogger reported he actually regreted writing the first wedges paper. Socolow responded to the contrary immediately and repeatedly since, and does so again in this publication.)

The update, while more alarming, has made less of a splash. The formal publication of Wedges II, if you will, was published simultaneously in two sites: the formal research paper appeared as ‘Wedges Reaffirmed’, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; a more shorter adaptation can be found at the Climate Central website.

Following both versions, there’s a fascinating trail of comments filed by high-level climate experts and global warming pundits such as the likes of Nicholas Stern (Chairman of the London School of Economics Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and member of the Global CCS Institute’s

International Advisory Panel), Natural Resource Defense Council’s director of climate programs David Hawkins, and even physicist Freeman Dyson, a climate change ‘heretic’.

Further afield, however, very few media outlets have paid attention to this update, as Petit points out. This is partly due, to be sure, to the recession and global anxiety, but it also reflects the ways in which climate messaging has backfired. Even Socolow, in the less formal write-up of his research at Climate Central, acknowledges that the first wave of climate analysis made mistakes:

“I submit, advocates for prompt action, of whom I am one, also bear responsibility for the poor quality of the discussion and the lack of momentum. Over the past seven years, I wish we had been more forthcoming with three messages: we should have conceded, prominently, that the news about climate change is unwelcome, that today’s climate science is incomplete, and that every ‘solution’ carries risk. I don’t know for sure that such candor would have produced a less polarized public discourse. But I bet it would have. Our audiences would have been reassured that we and they are on the same team – that we are not holding anything back and have the same hopes and fears.”

It is not too late to bring these messages forward.

He concludes with an assessment that many in this carbon policy and energy fields have likewise come to — that changing public opinion about climate policy will take more than science: “To motivate prompt action today, seven years later, our wedges paper needs supplements: insights from psychology and history about how unwelcome news is received, probing reports about the limitations of current climate science, and sober assessments of unsafe braking”.

Important as his revised analysis of the ‘wedges’ is, Socolow’s ruminations on the challenge of how to frame and communicate about the solutions is sage advice to help guide thinking about the CCS policy agenda as well.

Additional resources related to the stabilization wedges are available online at Princeton University.

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Is it fair for RAND to ask whether biomass co-firing can beat CCS on cost? | Global CCS Institute

I came across a tidbit in a recent RAND technical report, Near-Term Opportunities for Integrating Biomass into the U.S. Electricity Supply. While the focus of the bulk of the 187-page report, commissioned by the US Department of Energy, is biomass, RAND makes an intriguing, all-too-brief comparison with carbon capture and sequestration.

Its conclusion is that wood biomass, if sourced locally, is less costly than CCS – at least for the first 5 percent of  reduced fossil fuel input!. Here’s the nub of the report’s CCS assessment:

“Biomass cofiring is an alternative… [to CCS]. In CCS, the CO2 is captured from the flue gas and compressed for pipeline transport and permanent storage (NETL, 2010)…. [The] current estimated cost per ton abated for subcritical PC plants employing CCS, $94 per metric ton CO2e (NETL, 2010). We see that, for our three supply scenarios, our most likely cost of abating GHGs never rises above this estimate…. This result implies that, in a carbon-constrained world, cofiring would be an attractive option for reducing GHG emissions when compared with CCS at today’s costs. This result holds for the relatively expensive biomass–pellets transported over long distances, except at the high end of the cost estimates. Although the cost per ton of reducing GHG emissions is more attractive with cofiring than with CCS, the total number of tons of GHG emissions avoided is relatively small. Systems for CCS typically remove 80 to 90 percent of CO2 from flue-gas streams, reducing lifecycle GHG emissions by a similar percentage…. [C]ofiring subbituminous coal and wood chips at 10 percent results in GHG reductions of 8.7 percent because so much of the electricity is still generated by coal.”

For those interested in deeper details on cofiring, check out the 70-plus page report by clicking here. Regrettably, however, RAND makes no further mention of CCS, leading to more questions than answers.

  • Topping that list, as my colleague Christopher Short pointed out in our discussions of this report: why is CCS the bad guy here, posited as a high cost alternative? Any number of low-carbon technologies can make electricity, most of which are more expensive than co-firing a small amount of biomass with coal, but none of which address the compelling need to find a fix for greenhouse gas emissions from the installed base of fossil-fuelled power plants.
  • The findings are surprising given that some have claimed that biomass would lead to little—if any—net reductions of emissions over its lifecycle. If so, RAND’s exercise may ultimately be a moot point. In this camp is Resources For the Future’s Roger Sedjo, who has written that this conflict is in part due to varying time lines being assessed. In the long run, he argues, “biomass carbon is a zero sum game.” But for short periods and individual sites, he writes, the question is more complex.
  • The study’s conclusions are predicated on the coal substitute being “locally sourced wood biomass.” The study gives detailed cost comparison metrics about biomass costs and transportation’s factor. All the same, the cost question opens a Pandora’s box of follow on questions one of which is what about the majority of markets where supplies of woody biomass are scant or distant? That’s especially a concern for populated, built-up areas where power demand is typically greatest and biomass transport would be most costly.

Finally, however carbon-neutral or cost-effective it may, decarbonizing coal based energy systems through co-firing with biomass ultimately still requires the development of CCS to abate all the emissions. A less well known expectation is that to meet the stabilisation target of 450ppm of CO2-eq, CCS with biomass co-firing is a technology requirement for many of the energy-climate models used to explore mitigation pathways.