Abby L. Harvey
GHG Daily
2/8/2016
While carbon capture and storage technology provides the possibility of a decarbonized fossil energy system, its potential role in the industrial sector must not be ignored, experts at the Global CCS Institute’s Americas Forum stressed Thursday. “We really think that this is an area that deserves a lot more attention because without early action on this the world will find itself in a very difficult place to deal with industrial emissions if we don’t get CCS activities moving now,” institute CEO Brad Page said.
There are several industries, such as steel and cement manufacturing, in which options for limiting carbon emissions are extremely limited. Unlike in the energy sector, these manufacturing processes require the use of carbon-heavy materials. Put simply, electricity can be produced by wind turbines, but ethanol, steel, and cement cannot. That is where the need for CCS comes in, Page explained.
“Industrial emissions are about 25 percent of the total global emissions. There are few technologies available in most of those industrial applications to address the emissions,” he said. “CCS is almost uniquely placed to actually arrest the emission outcomes from industrial processes such as steel making, fertilizer manufacture, and cement manufacture, among many others.”
Several industrial CCS projects are already underway worldwide. Shell’s Quest CCS project in Alberta removes carbon from a bitumen upgrader, and the world’s first CCS project on a steel plant is currently under construction in Abu Dhabi.
“Yet, when we’ve looked around the world, policies to actually encourage [research and development] and deployment in this area, we can’t find any substance. Certainly we see in Canada and the U.S. some exceptions to this,” Page said.
If industrial CCS continues to be overlooked, decarbonizing the industrial sector could end up much costlier than necessary, Julio Friedmann, principal deputy assistant secretary for the Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy, told press at the event, explaining that CCS will be the least cost option in some markets. Thus, if CCS technology for industrial sources is not developed and deployed, the least cost option would no longer be available, making decarbonization more expensive. “In some markets, some technology is going to win, and if you take that option off the table, it will be more expensive in that market. CCS is absolutely the case with that, in particular around these industrial sources; steel plants, cement plants, petrochemical plants, fertilizer production, ethanol, all of these are actually very, very hard to decarbonize in the absence of CCS,” he said.
