Carbon emissions need to come down. And fast. So what if we could suck CO2 right out of the air and hide it underground? The good news: we can. The bad news: it’s really hard to do.
Experiments and trials of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology offers a glimpse of a future where CO2 from industrial and domestic emissions can be caught, transported and stored in underground reservoirs before it ever reaches the atmosphere. But despite early promise, progress in getting CCS technology to operate at scale has been worryingly slow.
The first time the European Union invested in CCS projects was almost ten years ago now. In an ambitious move to support energy transition, six CCS projects – including one in Hartfield in the UK – were selected to benefit from a £3.5 billion fund as part of the European Energy Programme for Recovery (EEPR). Ten years later, all six initial projects selected by the EEPR have been dropped, in most cases for lack of extra funding.
That’s not to say there wasn’t political will. In 2012, the European Commission launched another programme that included efforts to boost CCS. As part of the programme, £267 million went to fund one CCS project in the UK, called White Rose, which was launched two years later.
With a further £100 million in funding from the UK government, White Rose was all set to lead the European CCS race. Located on British energy supplier Drax’s site in North Yorkshire, it involved building a new coal-fired power station and building a transport and storage network to transfer CO2 to permanent storage in reservoirs under the North Sea.
It was hoped that 90 per cent of CO2 emissions produced by the plant would be captured, while providing the electricity for over 630,000 homes. But, in 2015, the UK government announced that the £1 billion it had planned to pump into the programme was no longer available. Citing a lack of other funding, the Department for Energy and Climate Change refused to give the go-ahead for the final phases of the project.
Like most of its European counterparts, White Rose was dropped because of money. That’s because it’s hard to anticipate the upfront cost of deploying CCS at industry-level – and projects are often abandoned because they fail to find funding for the next stage of their development. The Hartfield project, selected in 2009 by the EEPR, is yet another example. It benefited from €180 million (£160 million) in European funding, but was dropped in 2015 for the same reasons as White Rose. So is it time to give up hope on the carbon capture dream?
Hannah Chalmers, a researcher in energy storage and carbon capture at the University of Edinburgh, describes this as the “ebbs and flows” of CCS. “Governments put money on the table at the stage of initial designs, but in the next stages the money is not there,” she says. “White Rose was particularly upsetting because those investments would have been the last push. It did damage industry confidence quite a lot.”
Yet if we are to keep global warming under two degrees Celsius, carbon capture technology is crucial. In fact, research conducted by The Climate Institute in 2014 concluded that to meet targets, it is necessary not only to reduce carbon emissions, but also to remove it from the atmosphere.
This is where CCS can make a real difference: combined with the use of biomass to fuel power plants, it could actually reduce the amount of CO2 that is already in the atmosphere. Add in biomass, which is made of plants that capture CO2 from the air as they grow, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for fighting climate change. The carbon goes into the biomass, is burned in power stations, gobbled up using CCS and then buried safely underground. In theory you can have a carbon-negative power plant.
It is estimated that this process, called bioenergy carbon capture storage (BECCS) could deliver up to 55 million tonnes of net negative emissions a year in the UK. That’s half our emissions target for 2050.
Research is already underway to develop bio-CCS in the UK – especially since the government announced last year that it would close all coal power plants by 2025. Drax, for one, didn’t give up its efforts to develop CCS technology, despite the failure of White Rose. The company has since switched four out of its six electricity-generating units from coal to biomass, and is now looking to develop bio-CCS.
Last May Drax announced a BECCS project based on a £400,000 investment. The company is about to install a pilot plant that will trial a CCS technology that can separate CO2 from other emitted gases, and then store it to be reused.
Similar initiatives have been launched in other parts of the UK. The Teesside Collective in Stockton-on-Tees was created to develop a cluster of energy-intensive industries dedicated to establishing a CCS-equipped industrial zone in the Tees Valley. Instead of focusing on individual projects, the Collective’s aim is to create an area where several industrial plants could feed into a shared pipeline network transporting CO2 to offshore storage in the North Sea. This would be a way of converting a whole area to CCS technology.
A bio-CCS project is currently underway to capture CO2 from a biomass power station at Teesside and transport it for offshore storage. Mathieu Lucquiaud, senior lecturer at Edinburgh University, is part of the research team for the project. “The technology works,” he says. “The only obstacles in the way now are not related to the technology. It is a matter of insurance and business models.”
In other words, it all comes down to money – but business owners need to be reassured that implementing CCS will be economically sustainable. For Lucquiaud, that should be a matter of government policy. He argues it is the state’s responsibility to make sure that businesses can switch to models that include CCS without putting them at disadvantage in the face of competition.
One way to do that, he says, would be for the government to set up organisations to transport and store CO2, which businesses would pay a fee towards. This would mean that the most significant part of the new infrastructure required by CCS would be taken on by the government, making the technology more eye-catching for investors.
Lucquiaud’s view is shared by Chalmers – “a government-owned transport and storage service for all,” she calls it – yet no such organisation exists todat. Not even in North America, where CCS technology has already been deployed on a slightly bigger scale: 12 power plants are currently operating with carbon capture across Canada and the US.
It seems, for now at least, that CCS is experiencing growing pains. It’s ready to be implemented, but not yet proven enough to have gained industry confidence and investment. This is why the Climate Institute, in its 2014 report, recommended that CCS and bioenergy technologies be demonstrated “urgently”.
But the risks associated to CCS are not only financial; they are also environmental. Like landfill or nuclear waste, businesses aren’t keen on taking on the liability of storing CO2, even if it is buried deep in geological formations, or offshore in the North Sea. Although it’s been demonstrated in recent studies that captured carbon dioxide can be stored safely, the risk of a leak is a legitimate cause for concern.
Juan Alcalde led one of those studies at the University of Aberdeen, using computer simulations to model the storage of CO2 into the future. He found that 98 per cent of the CO2 that was captured and stored in his model could be safely retained over the next 10,000 years. “Of course, all human activity carries a degree of risk,” he says. “There is always a possibility that a CCS site may fail.”
For an example of the devastating consequences such failure could have, look to Lake Nyos in northwest Cameroon. In 1986, 1,746 people were killed by a limnic eruption – a very rare natural disaster in which dissolved carbon dioxide erupts from deep lake waters. Lucquiaud argues that responsibility for storage should again rest with the state. “Once you store CO2 in reservoirs, the liability for the CO2 staying in the reservoir should transfer from the business to the state,” he says.
Across the world, albeit at too smaller scale to make a huge different, CCS technology is slowly becoming a viable tool in the fight against climate change. As well as projects in Canada and the US, sites are also operational in Brazil, China and Saudi Arabia. Europe just needs to catch up.
“We are hopeful that there will be major policy announcements before the end of this year,” says Chalmers. “It’s a fighter, this tech. It’s still going despite all the things that have gone wrong.”
This article is part of our WIRED on Climate Change series. From the urgent race to make cows fart less to the battle over deep sea mining, we're taking an in depth look at the technologies and ideas at the forefront of our crucial mission to reverse the effects of global warming.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
