Consigning carbon to captivity?

Yorkshire has many claims to fame. But it’s keen to shed one dubious distinction, as the region with the highest CO2 emissions. Yorkshire Forward has hatched a plan – with carbon capture and storage at its core.

Yorkshire Forward (YF) is looking for a truly massive cut in CO2 emissions. The region’s current high carbon dioxide output is largely due to hosting so many high- electricity-using industrial operations, mainly around the mouth of the Humber. Having Drax, the UK’s largest coal-fired power station, within the region’s borders certainly doesn’t help with its CO2 emissions totals either.

Plans for tackling this situation, drawn up by YF, give an important role to what’s known as CCS (carbon dioxide capture and storage), the containment and burial of carbon dioxide in underground stores – where it is expected to remain for millions of years, so preventing its release into the atmosphere. If it were put into operation across the region on a big enough scale, this process could deal with many firms’ CO2, transported through a network of pipes.

YF is driving this use of CCS through the establishment of the Carbon Capture and Storage Partnership for Yorkshire and the Humber, a working group made up of representatives of the big CO2 emitters in the region and operators of the oil and gas fields in the southern North Sea. An initial feasibility study of the plans for a network, published in May, will be used to strengthen the group’s case for investment in CCS.

The group, chaired by YF’s head of sustainable development Mike Smith, includes Drax (based near Selby), metals group Corus (which makes steel products in Scunthorpe) and energy giants BP, Shell and ConocoPhillips, all of which run plants nearby.

“We produce 60 million tonnes of CO2 per year around the Humber estuary, in a strip around 30 miles wide and 45 miles long. It’s the region with the biggest CO2 output in Europe”, says Smith. “But that makes it potentially the biggest, quickest hit to reduce the UK’s CO2 emissions. We have the output and we have redundant pipelines running out to depleted oil fields in the southern North Sea so this is a massive opportunity.” Old oil and gas fields, he explains, are ideal locations for gas storage, and the introduction of CO2 also forces out any remaining oil or natural gas, offering potential income for the project.

However, establishing a network of the size required will still be hugely expensive. Smith estimates the entire network will cost £30 billion, including the investment required to make industry in the region ‘carbon capture ready’, although it will lead to some equally huge CO2 emissions reductions.

So wouldn’t it be cheaper to fund ways of not producing that much CO2 in the first place? YF has and still does support that, says Smith, but, he goes on: “We’ve got to be pragmatic about this and the UK will be using fossil fuels for the foreseeable future so this is the way to control their impact.”

Before a network connecting the big CO2 producers can be established, the first step should be the construction of a new CCS-ready, almost zero-CO2 power station to prove it can be done. This is due to be built in Hatfield, South Yorkshire, by 2013.

For a power station that will have 90% of its CO2 output captured, it might be surprising to hear that its fuel will be coal, traditionally one of the worst polluters. But this 900MW power station will be the first in the world to use so- called clean coal technology (which allows relatively simple extraction of CO2) on a commercial scale. It will be built on a site adjacent to the Hatfield colliery, which was reopened in April 2007.

The company behind this plan and the coal mine is Powerfuel Power, founded by Richard Budge. He has entered his plans for the Hatfield power station, with YF’s backing, to a government competition – launched by prime minister Gordon Brown himself back in November 2007 – to find the best CCS demonstration plant. The prize is up to 100% funding for a 300MW demonstration system, and the winning entrant is expected to be announced later this year.

Budge believes CCS has to happen.“We’re looking at taking away 15 million tonnes of CO2 per year. That’s a huge amount and would over-achieve our national Kyoto targets several times”, says Budge.

He claims that, although this would be pioneering work, all the technology is proven – albeit not yet at a commercial scale – and available. “This is a viable solution and gives maximum efficiency for a low cost, as the economies of scale achieved will be great. This is not hypothetical stuff”, says Budge, who also believes there is a political will to support the project.

Jeff Chapman, chief executive of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association, shares Budge’s belief that government support and financial backing in particular will be forthcoming. “We’re never going to achieve the CO2 reduction targets we’ve been set unless we up the funding for these projects,” says Chapman.

He adds that, while much attention and support is given to renewables, CCS might prove the better option: “In Europe, 20% of all energy will have to come from renewables by 2020. This is an extremely difficult target and it would be much more cost effective to achieve the same emissions reductions through CCS. Eventually I feel the sense of this will be seen by politicians and the public alike.”

Chapman’s optimism also extends to the public’s acceptance of a technology that, to the uninitiated, sounds like it may present even bigger problems if the buried gas escapes. But thanks to the way the CO2 is handled, under pressure and in liquid form, he’s confident that the chance of leakage is very remote.

“These aren’t vast empty caverns that the CO2 is being pumped into, it’s the tiny internal structure of rocks,” says Chapman. “It’s not going to easily come out from a mile under the sea bed and there’s no driving force to do that anyway. If the CO2 is going into old gas or oil wells then they’ve already been proven to contain gas and CO2 for millions of years.”

Because North Sea oil has only been exploited fairly recently, much data on the seabed is available and reveals plenty of usable rock formations. These are strata of porous rock to pump the CO2 into, with impervious rock above them to ensure the gas is contained. So the conditions for the UK, and off the Yorkshire coast in particular, are near-perfect, Chapman says.

“The UK is ahead of the rest of the world. It must exploit that lead”

Not least because of recent regulatory changes. “The UK is way ahead of the rest of the world in developing policy in this area,” says Chapman, who adds that the government has to act quickly to exploit that lead as several other countries, including the USA, Australia and Canada, have also been working on CCS technology.

Mike Smith echoes that point and hopes for strong support. “The government has an aspiration that the UK should be a world leader in CCS, and we really could be with this project,” he says.

Smith sees the global context as another strong plank in the case for CCS. With the world’s biggest developing countries relying on fossil fuels to meet their growing need for power, being able to sell them the expertise to clean up their emissions represents a huge export opportunity. “What’s really important is that we do this in China and India. Anything we do here will be dwarfed by their fossil fuel use,” he says.

Although it is still very early days, the many factors in the region’s favour certainly make the plan appear ripe for government backing. And if so, by the middle of the next decade the Yorkshire and Humber region may have a new claim to fame: being home to the
world’s biggest CO2 disappearing act.

– Neil Wilks

Yorkshire Forward is a Forum for the Future partner.

27 June 2008

Neil Wilks

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