Urgent call for CCS funding
7 Oct 2015
Targets for lowering carbon emissions from industry will remain out of reach without carbon dioxide mitigation technologies, say researchers.
Progress in overcoming the technical, infrastructure and financial barriers to the uptake of alternative low-CO2 technologies has been too slow, said Johan Rootzén, author of the industry report at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.
“There is an urgent need to demonstrate and implement carbon capture and storage (CCS) and other carbon dioxide mitigation technologies,” he said.
There are only a few investment cycles left to year 2050. If the EU is serious about reducing emissions by 80-90% by 2050, then the issue of how to finance the development and implementation of innovative process technology must be brought to the table now
Johan Rootzén, Chalmers University of Technology
Rootzén spent several years researching heavy industry in Europe, and his doctoral thesis focuses on carbon-intensive industries; petroleum refining, iron and steel production, and cement manufacturing.
As the EU prepares to roll out targets for emissions to reach almost zero by 2050, Rootzén said this could be undermined by a lack of political strategy on ways emissions from industry can actually be reduced.
The price of emission allowances under the EU Emission Trading System are currently far below the levels required to unlock investments in low-CO2 production processes in the carbon intensive industry, he said.
Because heavy industry plants have very long lifespans, implementation of new technology will take a long time, hence the opportunity to demonstrate new technologies such as CCS and other mitigation options is required now, said Rootzén.
“There are only a few investment cycles left to year 2050. If the EU is serious about reducing emissions by 80-90% by 2050, then the issue of how to finance the development and implementation of innovative process technology must be brought to the table now,” he said.
“Only ambitious deployment of CO2 Capture and Storage in the carbon-intensive industry [will] result in emissions reductions that are in line with the targets.”
Without this shift in technology, “refineries, steel and cement industries alone are going to be the source of up to a quarter of the emissions in 2050,” warned professor Filip Johnsson, who led the Chalmers research.
Rootzén says he hopes the research will lead to politicians taking the decision to pave the way for CCS and other mitigation technologies.
In the UK, however, investment in CCS is struggling to take hold.
Last month UK energy firm Drax announced it would end its investment in a large CCS project, after the UK government removed a tax exemption for renewable power sold to industrial companies.
The White Rose CCS project was originally intended to prove the commercial viability of carbon capture technology and demonstrate it as a competitive form of low-carbon power generation, however Drax said the project no longer viable.
CCS ‘fingerprints’
A new technique for monitoring carbon dioxide could assist development of CCS techniques, say scientists.
“We have shown for the first time that the naturally occurring helium, neon and argon in the injected gas is a unique ‘fingerprint’ that can be used to monitor the movement of the CO2, and determine how it is stored,” said co-author Professor Finlay Stuart, from the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC).
“Before CCS can become widely adopted as a method of CO2 mitigation we need to know how effectively the gas can be stored underground.”
The researchers collected gas samples in 2009 and 2012 from wells at the Cranfield CO2-enhanced oil recovery field in Mississippi, US.
They found that the noble gases were chemically inert, and not affected by interactions with rocks or water in the way that carbon dioxide is, and could be used to identify the physical processes that have affected the gas.
This provides a cheap way to fingerprint injected gases in future large-scale carbon storage projects for tracking the presence of deep shale gas and coal bed-derived methane in shallow aquifers during and after extraction, the researchers said.
