Abby L. Harvey
GHG Daily
2/9/2016
Working together, the nations of Mexico, the United States, and Canada can make great strides in developing carbon capture and storage technology, representatives from the nations’ energy departments said last week during the Global CCS Institute’s annual Americas Forum.
“Because all of the countries in the trilateral agreement are, in fact, not only heavy fossil energy consumers but also fossil energy producers and exporters, CCS has a special place in these discussions, and it is our hope and wish to see the three countries find new ways of working together to increase the impact of CCS in terms of global emissions reductions,” said Julio Friedmann, principal deputy assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy.
Mexico to date has the least developed CCS program of the North American countries. While the nation has developed a CCS road map, it does not have the operating projects and pilots found in Canada or the U.S. However, the country seeks to correct that in the future. “One of [our goals] is for 2024, 35 percent of the electricity that we must produce must be clean energy. So CCS, it’s an important tool to get there, not only from a domestic perspective, a national perspective, but also from an international perspective to mitigate climate change,” said Hector Castro Vizcarra, representative of the Ministry of Energy (SENER) at the Embassy of Mexico in the United States.
Canada, home of the world’s first full-scale post-combustion CCS project on an energy plant, is happy to share the knowledge it has gained from the venture with its fellow countries. “I think the world is looking to see how we help and get Mexico’s program up and running and show the world that this can be done, and it can be done effectively and at a reduced cost. … I really think that we have an opportunity to show how well North America can work together,” said Geoff Murphy, partnerships director within the Innovation and Energy Technology Sector of Natural Resources Canada.
The trilateral agreement on energy science and technology was developed in 2007 to stimulate innovation and to share and help build capacity in all three North American countries.
The governments have carried out several collaborative efforts relating to CCS in the years following the agreement’s establishment. For example, technology developed by the U.S. National Energy Technology Laboratory is being tested at Shell’s Quest CCS Project in Alberta through a memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed by the U.S. Department of Energy and Shell Canada in February 2015. The monitoring, verification, and accounting (MVA) technology for underground CO2 storage is being tested alongside Shell’s own MVA technology, already installed at the project’s underground storage site, a saline aquifer.