Lawrence Livermore National Lab to Play Role
Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
11/14/2014
The United States and China will launch a new joint carbon capture, utilization and storage project in China as part of a new climate agreement announced this week. Relying in part on research from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the project will use captured CO2 for enhanced water recovery. The United States and China will make equal funding commitments to the project, with additional funding to come from other countries and private industry. “In addition, both sides will work to manage climate change by demonstrating a new frontier for CO2 use through a carbon capture, use, and sequestration (CCUS) project that will capture and store CO2 while producing fresh water, thus demonstrating power generation as a net producer of water instead of a water consumer. This CCUS project with Enhanced Water Recovery will eventually inject about 1 million tons of CO2 and create approximately 1.4 million cubic meters of freshwater per year,” a White House fact sheet says.
Under the agreement, the United States has committed to reducing net greenhouse gas emissions 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025 and China has committed to setting targets to peak CO2 emissions by 2030 and to increase non-fossil fuel energy production to 20 percent of their energy mix by 2030. To do this, the announcement says, work to advance clean coal innovations, among other steps, will be ramped up.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will play a role in the project on the U.S. side, a representative from the lab told GHG Monitor this week, though to what extent is yet to be determined. Research into EWR has been ongoing at the lab for the past five years, Roger Aines, Senior Scientist at LLNL, told GHG Monitor this week. “Details are limited, basically the U.S. and China have agreed to tackle a large-scale demonstration,” Aines said. “The details of that large scale demonstration are yet to be worked out. The one thing that’s mentioned in there that we’ve been a part of and we’re very proud of is that they want to demonstrate enhanced water recovery. That’s a technology where you remove brine from the storage reservoir and make room for CO2 and then you treat that brine and you make fresh water out of it.”
EWR Process Could Allow for Increased Storage, Provide Revenue Stream
The EWR process is not unlike enhanced oil recovery, a practice which has been used in U.S. oil fields for decades, however, Aines explained, there are several reasons the EWR process may have been selected for use in this project. “If you can use [CO2] for enhanced oil recovery, of course you will. This is second choice, but we all recognize that enhanced oil recovery anywhere has limits on how much CO2 can be used and eventually we need to capture much much more than that,” he said. Straight geologic storage into saline aquifers is possible, but without the added revenue stream it’s difficult to make a business case.
By using a EWR process, the potential volume of the reservoir can be increased as pressure is decreased and a usable product in the form of freshwater is produced. That water can then be used for any number of purposes including being pumped into a power plant’s cooling tower. “For a power plant this kind of thing can provide a substantial portion of water the power plant needs. When you produce that water the new power plant can use, then you enable the power plant to be built without using somebody else’s water resource,” Aines said.
New Project ‘Landmark Development,’ Expert Says
The scale of the proposed project significantly surpasses previous collaboration between the U.S. and China in the CCS field. “I was very happy to see CCUS called out explicitly with a specific project delineated this time in the agreement,” Elizabeth Burton, General Manager for The Americas with the Global CCS Institute, told GHG Monitor this week. “The previous clean energy research center, CERC, had also included CCS but it was more [research and development] type activities so this is very much a landmark development in the sense that they actually have a demonstration project called out and in particular it’s a new version of CCUS that has been shown possible in concept but this will be the first time where they’ve actually had the ability to test it in the field, this idea of withdrawing water for pressure maintenance from saline storage and treating it so it can be used for either potable or agricultural use. We’re pretty excited about it.”
CERC Agreement Extended, Expanded
The new agreement also looks to boost both countries’ commitment to the U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center. The CERC mandate will be extended for an additional five years, from 2016-2020, and funding will be renewed for the center’s three existing tracks: building efficiency, clean vehicles, and advanced coal technologies with carbon capture, use and sequestration (CCUS). In addition, a new track will be launched on “the interaction of energy and water (the energy/water ‘nexus’),” according to the White House fact sheet. “The five-year extension of the CERC Protocol and the CO2 reductions agreements underlying it are important because China and the U.S together emit roughly 45 [percent] of the world’s annual total CO2 emissions. It is also important to note that China has a very serious problem with criteria emissions (CO, Pb, Hg, NOx, Sox, PM2.5) that the US has been controlling well pursuant to the 1970 Clean Air Act and its amendments). A collaboration on carbon reduction, though not explicit to the criteria pollutants, also should have positive consequences in China,” James Wood, Director of the U.S. side of the Advanced Coal Technology Consortium at CERC, told GHG Monitor this week.
Deal Sends Signal
The United States and China, being the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gasses, making a commitment to advance clean coal technologies sends an important signal to other world leaders, Kurt Waltzer, Managing Director of the Clean Air Task Force, told GHG Monitor this week. “I think it’s crucial that two of the biggest economies in the world, one developed and one a developing country, are investing in CCS technology,” he said. “I think it will have implications not only for industrialized countries but countries that are going along the development curve. It’s very important for North America and Europe to decarbonize but looking out over the next several decades, we need to have technology options that work in China, that work in India and work in Africa, so having the U.S. and China commit to innovations and advancements in this technology is crucial.”
The importance of CCS in reaching climate goals is already an accepted fact, but the significant inclusion of CCS in the deal made between the United States and China sends a signal that it’s time to move on getting CCS innovation off the ground, Burton said. “I think it’s more a signal that there’s a recognition that things have to happen faster, that there needs to be more government support for these large scale demonstration projects of various aspects of the CCUS technology and more research into ways of improving the business case and looking at the whole value chain. With each project we learn more, with each project the costs go down.”
