Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
12/5/2014
Testing of a new carbon capture solvent developed by Shell Cansolv has begun at the Technology Centre Mongstad’s amine test facility, TCM and Shell announced last week. Testing will be done utilizing exhaust gas from TCM’s Combined Heat and Power (CHP) Plant. Shell Cansolv’s capture technology is currently being used at the Boundary Dam CCS project in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, the world’s first commercial-scale CCS coal-fired power plant project, and is also the selected technology for the planned Peterhead CCS Project in the United Kingdom that would be that country’s first commercial-scale full-chain gas CCS demonstration project. “We piloted this solvent a lot on coal. We have a lot of experience on that. We were very specific—we wanted to have a site which was already built, which already operated for several years and on gas and at a significant size,” Shell Cansolv’s Research and Development Team Lead Paul-Emmanuel Just said during an event held at TCM last week.
The new solvent, DC201, has been under development since 2010, Just said, and has gone through pilot-stage testing in the past few years. “Here we are at the demonstration phase. What we want to do is to finalize and optimize the development of this new solvent, DC201. We did 4,000 hours of development and on site piloting of this solvent. Now what we want to do is a solid long-term run to optimize the system,” he said. “We’ll demonstrate the CO2 capture performance on [a Combined Cycle Gas Turbine], which is quite important,” he said, adding that the testing is also intended to “demonstrate the efficiency of emission reduction schemes, because indeed it’s quite an important part of the success of CO2 capture with amines to be environmentally friendly” and to “study long term stability and operability of the solvent and of the process,” as well as to demonstrate “the versatility of the capture system.”
Shell has a growing portfolio of CCS projects underway, including the Quest project in Alberta, Canada; the Gorgon project in Australia and the proposed Peterhead project. “This portfolio of projects has been designed to really test all the technologies that we think we need to be knowledgeable about, that we need to build the capability in, to be able to deploy CCS at large scale,” Tim Bertels, Manager for Shell’s Global CCS Portfolio, said at the event. “We want to demonstrate that CCS can not only be used at large scale for coal, but also for gas-fired power stations,” he said.