Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
11/21/2014
North America currently leads the world in terms of carbon capture and storage deployment, but globally, progress must be accelerated if climate goals are to be met, Global CCS Institute General Manager for the Americas Elizabeth Burton said during a webinar hosted by GCCSI this week. Progress needs to be made in several sectors including technology, policy development and increased public understanding and acceptance, Burton said. The GCCSI forecasts that three large-scale CCS demonstration projects will be running by 2020, all of them located in North America. The Boundary Dam project came on-line in Canada this year and two projects, the Kemper County Energy Facility in Mississippi and the Petra Nova Carbon Capture Project in Texas are due to come into operation in 2016. However, those three projects account for very little of the deployment necessary to combat climate change, Burton said.
Regardless of the important milestones reached this year, including the opening of the Boundary Dam project, Burton said, there is still a lot to be done. “The concern though, in spite of all the good news this year, is that we still have a very daunting challenge ahead of us. … We right now are around 40 metric tons per annum of CO2 that’s being captured. If we stay on track, by 2020 we’ll be at a little over 100 per annum and that comes to about 3 gigatons cumulatively over 39 years,” Burton said.
However, looking at scenarios from various research organizations, that’s not enough, she said. “In general most of them contribute about 14 -19 percent of the carbon emissions reductions that have to be completed or solved by use of CCS or CCUS … That equates to around 150 gigatons stored by 2050,” Burton said. “If you do a sort of back of the envelope of how many projects that is, given sort of an average size of a source, that’s about 3,000 CCS projects that we have to have up and operating by 2050 to get to that goal. In that context, the three that we’ve achieved, or will achieve by 2020, is really kind of a drop in the bucket but it is something and I think we have to take heart in and also realize that the size of the challenge is really quite daunting and we need an accelerated pace to transform the energy structure to enable us to move that forward.”
North America ‘Leads The Pack’
In terms of actual projects, Burton said, “North America still leads the pack with 26 and we are seeing good follow through along the pipeline. We have a pretty even distribution of projects from early planning through operation.” According to the GCCSI’s Global Status of CCS 2014 report released earlier this month, in North America there are currently five projects in the early planning stage, six in the advance planning stage, six under construction and nine in the operation phase. Looking forward, projects will become more diverse, Burton said. “Subsequent to 2015, when we look at the stuff that’s in the pipeline, we really start to see this diversification across the full spectrum of sources for CO2 capture basically and we’re very pleased to see that diversification finally happening,” Burton said.
Opportunities for Progress in All Areas
To advance the deployment of CCS at the large-scale, several issues need more resolution, Burton said. “If we assess where we are with technology, the individual components … are pretty well understood. Many are technically mature,” she said. “What we need pilot- and large-scale demonstration projects for is to contribute confidence that we know how to couple all of these technologies in to integrated systems and that we have confidence that we can run these safely and effectively,” Burton said. “There are many opportunities still in the technology realm particularly in capture systems. There are many novel capture methods that really might be game changers in terms of the cost of capture.”
Advances must also be made in terms of policy, Burton said. CCS must be treated equally with other low-carbon technologies in order to develop a case for investing in the industry. “If there’s alignment of CCS policy and regulatory environments, investment will follow and we’ve seen this definitely with other types of clean energy technology,” Burton said. “We are seeing consistently policy throughout the world that acknowledges the importance of CCUS to mitigating climate change. Unfortunately, when we kind of drill down from that, you don’t see the policies being enacted to provide long term clarity that will help businesses move projects forward, we certainly don’t see CCUS treated equivalent to other low carbon technologies in terms of incentives or portfolio standard
