The use of carbon capture and storage technology cannot and will not be limited to coal-fired energy generation, a panel of experts said Monday at the ExchangeMonitor’s annual Carbon Capture and Storage Conference in Tysons, Va.
“What does the future hold for CCUS? It certainly holds the unknown,” said Jeff Erikson, general manager for the Americas with the Global CCS Institute. Erikson went on to predict that among the trends CCS will follow, the technology will eventually be adopted to a wider variety of emitting sources.
Thus far, much of the CCS conversation has been focused on developing the technology to decrease the emissions of the world’s greatest carbon emitting sector, energy generation, and specifically coal-fired production.
However, coal is not the only fossil fuel fueling our planet. As the cost of natural gas has dropped, its use in energy generation has risen; and while it is a lower carbon fuel source, it is not a no-carbon fuel source. This is one reason the Department of Energy has sought to pursue a natural gas CCS demonstration for several years, said John Litynski, Carbon Capture Program manager with the DOE Office of Fossil Energy.
After repeatedly requesting in the appropriations process funds for a natural gas CCS demonstration, and year after year being denied by Congress, DOE took a new approach for the fiscal 2017 budget plan. In its request, the department scrapped the separation of “coal” and “natural gas” from its fossil fuel research and development budget, which would make it possible to apply funds supporting CCS to either fuel source.
Under the requested setup, the department would then fund three large-scale CCS post-combustion pilot projects, including a front-end engineering design (FEED) study and initial construction of a large pilot facility to capture CO2 from a natural gas power system. However, both chambers of Congress denied the department’s proposed update to the fossil energy R&D budget structure.
Even if the funding for natural gas-related CCS research isn’t appropriated by Congress, much of what has already been done will aid in an eventual transition to natural gas. “Most of the research that we’ve been doing on coal has a significant applicability to natural gas. There’s a lot of common issues,” Litynski said.
Of course, it’s not all the same. The carbon intensity of natural gas, for example, is much lower than that of coal.
Even beyond the shift from coal with CCS to natural gas with CCS, further opportunities remain, the panelists said. “I think there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit there with industrial sources, especially near pipelines and close to enhanced oil recovery operations,” Litynski said, noting that a significant portion of the world’s emissions stems from industrial sources such as cement and steel manufacturing.
