CCP Project Activities

Overview

The industry and government organisations in the CCP jointly fund and actively participate in the activities programme; sharing and contributing their own internal technical resources, as well as engaging the world's premier technologists, scientists, economists, policy makers and academics from universities, technology companies and research institutions across the globe to investigate and develop realistic and cost-effective technical CCS solutions.

Through this international public-private collaboration, the CCP is playing a significant role in the rapid development of technology and the transfer of scientific and engineering know-how in the field.

The CO₂ Capture Project is split into teams covering three key CCS areas:

Capture

CO₂ has been captured from both natural and industrial sources for many years and used in many areas such as for soft drinks and food preservation. The challenge for wide scale application is to reduce costs and to develop technologies that can be applied to the world’s largest CO₂ sources, ranging from coal and gas-fired power stations to oil refineries, chemical plants and iron and steel production facilities.

In the second phase of its work, the CCP focused on identifying technologies with the potential to reduce the cost of capturing CO₂ by 50% for current facilities and by 75% for new-build plants from the level established in 2000.

Key findings from the second phase (CCP2) include:

Oxy-fuel combustion has been shown to offer the greatest potential, both technically and economically, for capturing CO₂ emitted by the largest source in oil refineries, the Fluid Catalytic Cracking unit (FCC). A demonstration in an industrial scale refinery is scheduled for 2010.

An advanced oxy-firing technology, chemical looping combustion (CLC), was found to have potential for scaling up to capture CO₂ from heavy oil and tar sand processes, which are known for their high energy consumption. CLC will be scaled-up further.

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Storage, Monitoring and Verification (SMV)

The first phase in storing CO₂ securely underground - the beginning of the trapping process - is the high pressure injection of the captured CO₂ into the porous rock through wells drilled in the cap-rock. Due to this high pressure, and the higher temperatures and pressures that act on it deep underground, the CO₂ becomes a “supercritical fluid”, which has the properties of both a liquid and a gas. These properties mean that it is easy to inject and it diffuses readily through the pore spaces of sandstone formations, but like a liquid, it takes up much less space than a gas would, increasing the amount of CO₂ that can be stored in a given volume of rock. 100 cubic meters of CO₂ in the atmosphere occupies only a quarter of one cubic foot of pore space when it is one kilometer below the earth’s surface. This property allows very large volumes of CO₂ emissions to be securely stored in deep geological formations.

The principal objective of the SMV programme is to address remaining technical issues in geologic CO2 storage assurance. During CCP2 this has been accomplished through a number of studies including:

A Well Integrity Field Study shows that selecting the appropriate drilling and installation procedures is more important than the choice of materials for long term well stability.

A Certification Framework has been developed to provide a simple, transparent guide to the site review process; essential to help decision makers to identify and manage the CO2 storage process.

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Policies and Incentives

In time, increasing economies of scale, technological progress and growing know-how will reduce the costs of CCS. Putting a price on carbon emissions, already practised in the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme and expected to be more widely adopted, will make CCS - as a very low-carbon technology - more competitive. However, until CCS projects are competitive solely as a result of carbon pricing, we look to governments to make up the difference between the price of carbon and the extra cost CCS places on generation.

This is what makes policy matters key to the successful deployment of CCS technology. To this end, the CO₂ Capture Project organized a Policies and Incentives Team (P&I Team) in 2002 to begin studying the state of policies, regulations, incentives, and potential barriers around the world. The P&I Team had the primary mission to provide information and advice to the CCP partners on these issues and any other external developments that may impact or benefit the technology programme being developed by the CO₂ Capture Project.

In CCP2, key work has included two studies to address the issues of financing a CO2 transportation pipeline infrastructure and to address HSE regulations and risks for natural gas, sour gas and CO2 pipelines.

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