WRAP UP

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
5/17/13

AT DOE

Acting Assistant Energy Secretary for Fossil Energy Chris Smith called Air Products and Chemicals’ industrial carbon capture and storage project near Port Arthur, Texas a “groundbreaking” venture during the facility’s demonstration ceremony late last week. The DOE and industry cost-share project “demonstrates the potential to produce economic benefits and increase our energy security while greatly reducing the environmental impacts of our fossil energy use,” Smith said in remarks at the May 10 event. The $430 million retrofit to Valero Energy Corp.’s preexisting hydrogen production facility began capturing CO2 at its first of two steam methane reformers in December and reached full capacity last month. From there, more than a million tonnes of CO2 per year is being transported through Denbury Resources’ Green Pipeline for enhanced oil recovery operations at the oil and gas company’s West Hastings oilfield south of Houston. DOE said in a release that more than 200,000 tonnes of CO2 has been captured and stored as of early May. The project is DOE’s first integrated, large-scale CCS project to come online.

ON THE INTERNATIONAL FRONT

CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have surpassed 400 parts per million, reaching their highest level in more than three million years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other climatology groups announced late last week. NOAA said May 10 that measurements at its Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii found that the daily mean concentration of CO2 passed the dubious benchmark for the first time since the Department of Commerce agency began taking such measurements in 1958. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography said that CO2 concentrations have not been so high since the Pliocene era, three million to five million years ago. “The evidence is conclusive that the strong growth of global CO2 emissions from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas is driving the acceleration,” NOAA Senior Scientist Pieter Tans said in a statement. Organizations such as the International Energy Agency have argued that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere should not exceed 450 ppm if people want to limit global temperature increases to less than 2 degrees Celcius above preindustrial levels and limit the effects of climate change.

Statoil will soon call tender for carbon capture technologies for Norway’s first full-scale CCS project at the Mongstad oil refinery, Point Carbon reported this week. The Reuters-owned news organization quoted Statoil Vice President for CO2 Management Kai Lima, who said the company plans to “call a tender to supply carbon capture technology in a few weeks, and our plan is to award the contract before the summer of 2014.” Five capture technology providers—including Alstom, Siemens and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries—have been participating in a pre-qualification program for the project in order to prove that they have technologies that are scalable for the 350 MW venture. The Norwegian government is expected to make a final investment decision on Mongstad in 2016. Officials delayed making such a decision in 2011, citing concerns over the lack of information surrounding the health and environmental impacts of amine solvents if emitted into the atmosphere.

The final report from an industry-led task force argues that CCS can be cost competitive with nuclear and other renewables in the U.K. by the 2020s, but only if government does more to incentivize the technology’s development. The CCS Cost Reduction Task Force, an industry-led joint task force established by the U.K. government, published seven steps this week that the U.K. government could take to incentivize CCS RD&D in the short-term. It calls on government to promote characterization of CO2 storage locations and enhanced oil recovery projects, as well as look at options for developing CCS transport and storage network configurations. The government should also put in place funding mechanisms that look beyond the U.K.’s current CCS demonstration program and provide the kind of long-term operational support that could incentivize more projects on power generation and industrial units. “U.K. gas and coal power stations equipped with carbon capture, transport and storage have clear potential to be cost competitive with other forms of low-carbon power generation, delivering electricity at a levelized cost approaching £100 ($152) /MWh by the early 2020s, and at a cost significantly below £100/MWh soon thereafter,” the report says.