Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
3/6/2015
The demonstration phase of the Callide Oxyfuel Project in Queensland, Australia has come to a close, project developers announced this week. The project, billed as the world’s first industrial scale demonstration of oxyfuel combustion and carbon capture technology, has been operating for more than two years, having launched in December 2012. The initial results of the project have proven promising, according to a release. “We successfully tested oxyfuel technology and carbon dioxide capture under ‘live’ power station conditions for more than two years, and our results show it is ready for the next steps toward commercial application,” Callide Oxyfuel Project Director Chris Spero said in the release. “The future for this technology is very exciting,”
Callide is a $245 million 30 MW retrofit project capturing CO2 from Unit 4 of CS Energy’s previously-mothballed Callide A Power Station for storage in a nearby deep saline formation. The project is among the world’s largest oxyfuel demos. While the technology has been demonstrated on a smaller scale elsewhere, Callide is the first project to bolt the technology onto an existing large-scale facility, developers said. “Our project has helped create a pathway for the design and construction of larger scale oxycombustion plants with carbon capture, as both ‘bolt-on’ technology to existing plant or as newbuild plant,” Spero said.
Further, Spero said, the Callide project provided CO2 which has helped advance research into carbon storage through its collaboration with CO2CRC. “Carbon dioxide from the Project was transported by road to Victoria and injected underground at CO2CRC’s Otway Project site in South Western Victoria. Building on the large body of work already done by CO2CRC, the injected carbon dioxide was used to evaluate the geochemical and physical behaviour of carbon dioxide within the storage rock,” he said.
Callide was funded in part by the Australian and Japanese governments. The project was awarded $63 million from the Australian Government under the Low Emissions Technology Demonstration Fund as well as finical support from the Japanese and Queensland governments and technical support from the Japan Coal Energy Center. The project is an international joint venture between CS Energy, the ACA Low Emissions Technologies (ACALET), Glencore, Schlumberger Carbon Services, and Japanese participants, JPower, Mitsui & Co., Ltd., and IHI.
