The Middle East has high emissions per capita – but it also has bold plans to scale up carbon capture and storage in a grand way.
The region’s potential “is absolutely huge”, KBR regional director for Africa and Middle East Chris Blackburn said on the sidelines of Adipec. The region is crucial to future energy plans. Regional governments see CCS as providing them with the licence to continue operating.
“Decarbonising production here is critical for those key demand centres of India and China,” Blackburn said. The Middle East, given the region’s productive capacity, will be “the ones that lead the way, for sure”.
The region currently has around 10% of global CCS capacity, Emerson vice president Mounir Taleb noted.
“The Middle East has the potential to become a large-scale world class carbon capture hub thanks to the abundance of industries with high CO2 emissions and located close to areas with substantial geological storage capacity,” he said.
Eyeing the options
Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar dominating regional CCS plans. “It’s easier to collect CO2 from a refinery, from a gas processing plant, from a petrochemical plant, than it is to collect it from a power or cement plant, simply because you have higher purity CO2 in their emissions.”
The link between this source of CO2 and the companies able to invest in capturing emissions, dictates Middle Eastern NOCs will drive the pace.
NOCs will be crucial driving CCS adoption in the Middle East, Belltree’s Grant Stewart noted. “Policy will be driven by the NOCs, and at the ministry level, and then cascading down.”
Belltree is close to launching a software platform, bMark™>CCS, to screen CCS opportunities. Stewart explained the aim was to provide organisations with a view to understanding CCS potential across their portfolio.
“The pressure is on industry to accelerate in this space, but it’s the government that creates an attractive investment position. Organisations have historically been reticent to be frontrunners, but this is changing out of the absolute necessity to capture carbon.”
Belltree has been having discussions with governments around the world on CCS. “There’s a lot of discussions going on, while the sense is that the hydrogen piece is not maturing quite as swiftly.”
Driving factors
Adnoc has set the goal of reaching net zero by 2045, with CCS playing a crucial role. The company took a major step in demonstrating how seriously it takes CCS with its recent announcement on Hail and Ghasha.
The major gas project will include the capture of 1.5 million tonnes per year of CO2, taking Adnoc’s committed CCS capacity to nearly 4mn tpy. The plan for Hail and Ghasha is to capture the CO2 offshore, move it onshore and store it underground.
KBR has been involved in some of Adnoc’s plans, Blackburn said, including on Ghasha.
The UAE has “announced at the country-wide level a desire to do a carbon trading scheme, carbon pricing. And they’re taking the critical steps to making these things happen.”
Policy and regulatory certainty plays a key role in moving projects forward, he said. Blackburn noted European regulations on carbon as helping drive investment.
“Without the policy in place and a [carbon] pricing scheme in place that’s long-term in its nature, these projects can’t proceed,” he said.
Utilisation
Adnoc’s first step into CCS domestically was at the Al Reyadah steel project, with CO2 going into enhanced oil recovery (EOR). The project uses Emerson technology.
In the Middle East, where there is no carbon price, companies are focused on how to find value in their CO2 plans. “It’s the U of CCUS that makes it viable,” the Emerson official said. “Otherwise there’s no financial benefit in doing it.” Adnoc doubled its carbon capture goals in October to 10mn tpy by 2030.
“It’s the actual user of CO2, the oil and gas companies using CO2 for what we call EOR or Enhanced Oil Recovery, that are subsidising those projects. That helps fund and deploy CCUS in multiple locations, and evolve to accelerate innovation,” Taleb said.
He went on to say the Middle East’s “proximity of the users and the producers to help make those projects more financially viable is key and allow for the development of capture hub concepts. You don’t have that everywhere on the planet.”
Collaboration and complexity
“The key thing for decarbonisation and the energy transition is collaboration. We have to share knowledge better,” Blackburn said. The need to improve on collaboration increases as projects become more complex.
Building in complexity into new projects – such as CCS or electrification – challenges the supply chain and brings in more partners.
“Scaling up is key. I think the world’s largest [CCS project] at the moment is 1.5-2 million tons per annum,” he noted. It is only by increasing the scale, that economics can improve. “The larger the scale you go, the lower that price per barrel can come down.”
Saudi Aramco’s Jubail project aims to achieve just this. The ambitious project would capture 9mn tpy, making a serious impact on unit prices.
While scaling up improves economics, it also raises more risks around operational challenges, Taleb said. Contractor choices should aim to tackle this, improving both energy and process efficiency while driving operational certainty.
The next – and more challenging – step for CCS will be its move into capturing emissions from the power industry. Emerson’s Taleb noted the low purity CO2 streams from power plants.
“A power plant typically would have below 15% of CO2 content. A natural gas processing facility, a petrochemical plant, will have over 80% CO2 purity making CCUS deployment more technically and economically feasible.”
A lack of purity in the CO2 stream, such as moisture, would produce carbonic acid. Taleb warned this “can corrode the pipe and then you have potential pipe burst”.
Hydrogen
The Middle East’s CCS investments will play into the region’s plans to export blue hydrogen and its derivatives. The KBR official predicted regional producers would be working on lower carbon oil and gas, in addition to hydrogen.
Hydrogen projects “have a longer cycle, so they’re maybe five to seven years compared to these decarbonisation projects on existing plants that can be done in maybe three or four years. Running them in parallel will be critical”, Blackburn said.
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