International

Tamar Hallerman GHG Monitor 09/14/12 AT QUEST: PROJECT FACILITY TO BE CONSTRUCTED EOR-READY Even though Shell Canada is not going to pursue enhanced oil recovery offtake agreements for the CO2 captured at its Quest carbon capture and storage project, the company is building the facility to be EOR-ready in case it eventually does decide to […]

Summit Power Group has signed a memorandum of understanding with Sinopec Engineering Group and the Export-Import Bank of China to help finance a significant chunk of the company’s Texas Clean Energy Project.

Royal Dutch Shell has approved final plans for its Quest carbon capture and storage project in Alberta, Canada, and will begin construction this fall, the company announced this week.

09/07/12 The following interview with Mike Monea, president of Carbon Capture and Storage Initiatives at SaskPower, was conducted by GHG Monitor Reporter Tamar Hallerman in Regina, Saskatchewan. What is the current status of SaskPower’s retrofit of Boundary Dam Unit 3 (BD3)? The Boundary Dam capture unit is roughly 65 percent complete. It has to be […]

Coal miners in the Italian region of Sardinia ended a week-long strike earlier this week after the Italian government agreed to pursue a path forward—potentially with carbon capture and storage—for the country’s last remaining mine. 

Construction of the capture unit at SaskPower’s Boundary Dam Power Station is rapidly continuing as workers add nearly a foot in height daily to a cinderblock tower housing the plant’s CO2 and SO2 absorbers.

Researchers are moving forward on early drilling and sampling efforts in the shadow of SaskPower’s Boundary Dam facility as work ramps up on Saskatchewan’s newest CO2 subsurface monitoring project. 

Workers in Italy’s last remaining coal mine have barricaded themselves underground inside the mine, demanding that the government move forward on a carbon capture and storage operation that would extend the lifetime of the facility. 

While the European Union already has one of the key ingredients in place to help create a long-term business case for carbon capture and storage—a price on carbon emissions—its leaders will need to implement more short- and long-term incentive policies to ensure a strong investment climate moving forward, said Graeme Sweeney, chairman of the Zero Emissions Platform, the group of stakeholders tasked with advising the European Commission on CCS. 

China’s first carbon capture and storage demonstration project appears to be well underway, with more than 40,000 tons of carbon dioxide sequestered over the last 15 months, according to recent state media reports.

08/24/12 The following interview with Malcolm Wilson, chief executive officer of the Regina-based Petroleum Technology Research Centre, was conducted by GHG Monitor Reporter Tamar Hallerman. ON CANADIAN ENERGY POLICY: PTRC’S MALCOLM WILSON Next month, the Petroleum Technology Research Center is preparing to release a best practices manual for the monitoring work it conducted at the […]

Developers looking to improve calcium-based sorbent materials for carbon capture need to find materials that are less susceptible to degradation so that systems can run more reliably, according to a group of United Kingdom-based researchers. 

Researchers at Alstom Power are testing the technical viability of chemical looping combustion technology on the world’s largest scale yet at company facilities in Connecticut over the next several months. 

While the absence of incentive policies, federal involvement and public support continues to hamstring the deployment of carbon capture and sequestration projects, regional jurisdictions have made significant headway on the development of regulatory frameworks, according to the International Energy Agency.

Two International Energy Agency officials this week emphasized the need for policymakers in the world’s largest economies to put a price on carbon emissions if leaders want to keep climate change in check. 

A new-build 650 MW integrated gasification combined cycle coal plant with pre-combustion capture in east-central Britain and a post-combustion retrofit on one of Europe’s largest polluting lignite coal plants in central Poland are the two front-running carbon capture and storage projects that are likely to receive funding under the European Commission’s New Entrants Reserve competition, the Commission announced this week. 

Statoil and Gassnova have developed a set of methods for testing for potential emissions from post-combustion amine capture systems that they hope will eventually be the basis for a uniform testing methodology worldwide. 

Australia will implement one of the world’s largest taxes on carbon dioxide emissions beginning this weekend in a political gamble that is expected to define the future of the country’s current ruling party. 

GE will collaborate with technology developer Sargas AS to build one of the world’s first natural gas-fired power plants with an integrated carbon capture component for enhanced oil recovery operations, the companies announced this week.

The widespread deployment of biomass with carbon capture and storage technology is “urgently” needed if the international community wants to keep climate change at a manageable level, though the technology still has a ways to go in terms of development, according to a new report.

In order to keep global temperature increases at a manageable level, nations must dramatically cut back on coal use and install advanced systems such as supercritical and carbon capture and sequestration technologies on most new and existing fossil fuel-fired units as soon as possible, the International Energy Agency said. 

A 1.4 gigatonne discrepancy has been identified in China’s emissions reporting information, a finding that could signal flawed accounting inventories or the modification of data by government officials, according to a recent report published in the journal Nature Climate Change. 

The Senate passed a bill yesterday to allow a two-year extension of the current civil nuclear agreement with South Korea. The Administration has asked Congress pass a simple two-year extension of the deal, which expires in March, to allow for time to work out remaining issues including requirements related to enrichment and reprocessing. The House […]

In a stern warning to Congress against additional Iran sanctions, President Obama drew on the Administration’s arms control and nuclear security record to bolster the case for American diplomacy with Iran in his State of the Union address last night. “American diplomacy has rallied more than fifty countries to prevent nuclear materials from falling into […]

After Sellafield’s radiation monitoring system detected elevated levels Thursday night, non-essential workers were told to stay home Friday at the U.K. site. “Overnight the monitoring system initially indicated elevated levels of activity. Following investigation and analysis, we can now confirm these levels to be naturally occurring background radon,” according to a statement Friday from Sellafield […]

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is expected to vote today on the nomination of two key State Department nominees. The committee delayed a vote on Rose Gottemoeller and Frank Rose last month over concerns about a lack of commitment from the Administration to only undertake further nuclear weapons reductions through the treaty process. Gottemoeller is […]

A pair of key State Department arms control nominees were cleared by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday. Rose Gottemoeller, the President’s nominee to be Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, and Frank Rose, Obama’s pick to be Assistant Secretary of State for Verification and Compliance, were cleared by the committee […]

Mike McFaul is resigning as the U.S. Ambassador to Russia and leaving the Obama Administration after the Sochi Olympics, he said yesterday. McFaul has served as the U.S. Ambassador to Russia since 2011, spearheading diplomatic relations with Russia during a volatile time period. Relations with Russia in recent years have grown tense over a variety […]

A report on progress at Sellafield by the U.K. Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee is expected to be made public this week, according to The Guardian. The report would come after a PAC hearing in December in which committee members sharply questioned the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s recent decision to extend for five years Nuclear Management Partners’ […]

Questioning the U.K. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s decision last fall to extend for five years URS-led Nuclear Management Partners’ contract to clean up the Sellafield site, Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee released a report today demanding additional improvements. “The Authority must monitor progress and terminate the contract if NMP’s performance does not improve quickly. We want the […]