GHG Reduction Technologies Monitor Vol. 9 No. 38
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GHG Reduction Technologies Monitor
Article 4 of 9
October 10, 2014

INTERVIEW: TCM Chairman Tore Amundsen Discusses Status of CCS in Norway

By Abby Harvey

The following interview with Tore Amundsen, Chairman of the CO2 Technology Centre Mongstad (TCM), was conducted by GHG Reduction Technologies Monitor Reporter Abby L. Harvey on the sidelines of this year’s International Conference on Greenhouse Gas Technologies, held this week in Austin, Texas.

GHG Monitor
10/10/2014

To start things off, can you provide some information on TCM’s current activities?

The news is now first and foremost that we are now in the midst of starting up with a new vendor, Cansolv of Shell in Canada. They are going to test their solvents at TCM to qualify for the Peterhead project in the U.K.  Peterhead is a project operated by Shell. Shell has perhaps naturally selected Cansolv since Shell owns Cansolv as their technology, but they wanted to qualify first through a series of test campaigns at TCM which is very good fit first and foremost because TCM is particularly well-suited to do that since Peterhead is a gas-fired power plant and TCM has a link to the gas-fired power plant at Mongstad, and flue gas from the gas-fired power plant to test on.

In addition to that, we’ve just completed test campaigns with Aker Clean Carbon, the Norwegian company using amine technologies, as well. And we completed test campaigns with Alstom on the chilled ammonia technology. So that capture island will not be operated for a while until Alstom has done further R&D work on their technology and then possibly and hopefully need to have further test campaigns on the chilled ammonia capture island.

TCM, first and foremost, is a huge infrastructure with support systems that can sustain and test a number of other technologies using the flue gases that we have, using steam and other energies, all the instruments that facility is equipped with, and so on and so forth. So we are now in discussions with a number of technology vendors that are developing more newer and emerging technologies, particularly people here in the United States since the majority of new technologies are actually conceived here in the States. We have interesting discussions with a number of them to establish a sort of joint U.S.-Norwegian cooperation on tests and verification of emerging technologies. These are technologies that can either use the existing capture facility at TCM or technologies that will require new capture facilities to be built and installed at TCM and tied onto the infrastructure that we have.

The Norwegian government has made a number of statements proclaiming support for carbon capture and sequestration. How has the government demonstrated that support at this point?

Well, first of all, over a number of years the Norwegian government has supported the development of CCS substantially with considerable financial support to research and development and to the demonstration and verification of CCS through the CO2 Technology Center Mongstad. I think all together the Norwegian government has put up something equal to around about $2.5 billion accumulated over a number of years. For a country of 5 million people, that’s quite substantial.

The Norwegian government, both the current one and the previous one, had the ambition to also demonstrate CCS at large-scale on major emissions in Norway. And we had two projects; both of them unfortunately have been stopped. The first one was on a gas-fired power plant, but the power plant then stopped operation due to the fact that in Europe the price of natural gas is actually too high and electricity price too low to make it economical to produce electricity with the use of natural gas. And actually, last week, it was announced in the press that the power plant will now be preserved, which means that it’s highly unlikely that the power plant will become operational again in the foreseeable future.

The other project we had was on a combined heat and power plant which supports a refinery with heat and steam predominantly at Mongstad in Norway. That project was stopped by the previous government last year for various reasons. But the major reason I think was the fear that the refinery would cease operation before the capture plant would be ready to capture any CO2 because the refinery had been operating at a loss for a number of years. The refining business in Europe is very, very difficult. Many refineries in Europe have been closed down. So the government feared that to take on a huge investment of this nature with basically public money would be too risky and believed that the refinery might stop operation. There were also fears that it would be a very costly demonstration. And for that the reason the government then stopped the project. But it was heavily criticized both by the non-governmental organizations predominantly, but also by the opposition government because the government had spent that much money on it when they finally then decided to stop it.

But irrespective of that, the ambition to have a large-scale demonstration up and running by the year 2020 is upheld by the government. The government said that — again this is the new government that took office last year — that they want to do this their own way and develop a CCS strategy for a new government. That strategy will be disclosed this week actually. So we’ll have to wait and see what the government says, how to do this.

Norway is a very unique country with respect to power generation since around about 98 percent of all electricity in Norway is generated by hydropower. We actually do not have any coal-fired power plants. We have only very, very few, three actually, gas-fired ones and one was decided to put into preservation last week. So probably demonstration in Norway will then in all likelihood be on industrial emissions, for instance from a cement factory or refinery, or a petrochemical plant.

Is the CCS industry in Norway waiting on this week’s announcement by the government to set a path forward?

The government has already declared and it’s been written down in its political manifesto, which was made when it took office last year, that they have the ambition to demonstrate CCS large-scale by around 2020. And the way I see it, the opportunity is to do it on industrial emissions, which is a good thing because very few countries actually take an interest in industrial emissions today in spite of the fact that emissions from steel factories, cement works, petrochemical plants represent a fairly substantial portion of the CO2 emissions globally. So it’s absolutely necessary to also then start working on the industrial emissions, not only emissions on power plants.

What unique challenges will the industrial sector in Norway face in looking to implement CCS?

First of all, let me just point out that in the industrial sector, CCS is almost always the only option they have. In the power sector people can switch to renewables, go all nuclear and things like that. But in the industry sector the emissions are part and parcel of the processes they base their industrial production on. So CCS is an absolutely necessary technology eventually to adopt in various industrial settings. But it will be very individual from industry to industry and from plant to plant, how applicable CCS actually is.

In some cases CCS will be technically very, very difficult because of the fact that although a plant might have total huge emissions of CO2, the content of CO2 in the flue gas is very, very small. If you take an aluminum smelter, for instance, I believe that the CO2 content in the flue gas that’s coming out of the process is around about 1.5 percent, compared to a coal-fired power plant with 13, 14 percent or a cement factory with 15 to 20 percent CO2 in the gas.

So there will be technical challenges of various kinds. Some processes might be easier to capture CO2 from than other processes. But there will be some low-hanging fruits, so to speak, within the industrial sector. And cement might be perhaps the most obvious one with the high content of CO2 in the flue gas from cement production.

In the United States, there has been heavy discussion of using enhanced oil recovery to develop a business case for CCS? How can a business case for CCS be developed for Norway or Europe more broadly?

First of all, the reason it’s so important in the U.S. is the fact that the U.S. has huge natural domes of CO2 that have been exploited for the past 40 years for enhanced oil recovery. There is a history in the U.S. and there is an infrastructure in place. So there is a market and there is a distribution network and so on. In Europe, there is a substantial potential for enhanced oil recovery using CO2. The reason why it hasn’t been developed yet is the fact that so far there has been very little CO2 available for it in Europe. I believe that eventually when CO2 becomes available in Europe it will also be used for enhanced oil recovery, both onshore and offshore.

So you see enhanced oil recovery at some point also becoming part of a business case for CCS in Europe, as well?

It will. But I think that this is a chicken and egg sort of situation. I mean, probably you have to start developing capture units to accumulate the volume of CO2, initially just putting it into the ground in saline aquifers and things like that, and then as the volume of CO2 is picked up, there will be a demand for it, I believe, from oil companies that see an opportunity to increase the oil production using the CO2.

There is also, I think, though it has not been developed to any great extent yet, an opportunity to use CO2 for fracking. Today, fracking is predominantly done using water. But some studies have been done into using CO2 for fracking. It looks as if, in certain cases at least, CO2 might be very, very suitable, even more efficient than using water for fracking. So I think there will be great developments in this area. I think in order to have CCS deployed at some scale Europe also needs to create a value for carbon dioxide, similarly to what you have here in North America.            

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