Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
1/23/2015
A fourth phase of the CO2 Capture Project (CCP), a research collaboration of several major energy companies, will be a reassessment of work done in the first three phases to discover the most cost effective and efficient means of carbon capture, Nigel Jenvey, manager of Carbon Solutions for BP Group Technology within the Americas region, said during an event hosted by the United States Energy Association this week. “We’re continuing with CCP to try and find those capture technologies. It’s going to be a little more screening and proof of concept of some emerging breakthrough technologies. It’s going to be helping development and demonstration of some existing capture technologies to find out how they look in oil and gas scenarios, it’s going to be a mixture of all of that going on within CCP4,” he said.
The first phase of the CCP ran from 2000-2004 and consisted of screening and proof of concept. The second, which ran from 2004-2009, focused on intensive development and the third, which is ongoing, focuses on demonstration. Jenvey described the progress thus far as “a very linear process.” While the next anticipated step would be large-scale deployment, Jenvey said at this time that is not feasible. “CCS perhaps is anything but linear in the way that we need to look at it. We need to understand and some technologies will improve, some will not and we also consider recycling technologies, reevaluating the front end of our portfolio.”
Demonstration Project Behind Schedule
The third phase of the CCP was intended to be completed in 2013. However, because of difficulties resulting in the delay of one of the phase’s demonstration projects, hosted in Alberta, Canada, the phase has been extended into 2015. “This project now is delayed about two years. This was the final project that we’re meant to be doing in CCP3 and it’s yet to actually start up and that’s mainly around some of the logistical issues,” Jenvey said, explaining difficulties encountered working in northern Alberta. “There are only certain periods of the year that they can get in and do this. You miss a window and then you’re waiting basically another six months at least. Other issues on the field obviously take priority and therefore we’re just about to start up this project now. So that’s why CCP3 is continuing even now, even though we started up the next phase, CCP4, we can’t close the previous phase until this is done.”
While there has been delay at the Alberta project, CCP3 did have a successful demonstration project completed in Brazil. Jenvey stated that the project, a demonstration on a fluid catalytic cracking unit at a refinery, was “successfully implemented in 2012.” The project demonstrated “efficient and stable operation with a CO2 concentration effectively reaching 94 percent was achieved by adding in oxy-firing to an existing FCC,” he said.
Project Yet to Achieve Goal
However, regardless of the successful oxycombustion demonstration, CCP still remains far from their initial carbon capture goal. “With the technologies that we’ve looked at in the linear progression, we have not achieved our goal,” Jenvey said. “Our goal when we first set out on the CCP was by this stage to have got a 50 percent reduction in capture costs. We have no achieved that, nowhere near that.”