The head of carbon capture and storage research at the formerly state-owned TUV NEL laboratory, East Kilbride, insists that the UK is in a “strong position” to accelerate development and application of CCS technologies.
Lynn Hunter said the UK had made “steady progress” to date in developing the various technologies required to take CCS forward.
However, she admitted that, overall, there is still a considerable amount of work to be done over a relatively short timescale if the UK is to maintain a lead on CCS and reap the economic benefits.
Nonetheless, she told Energy that the consensus view to emerge from November’s TUV NEL carbon seminar was that Britain is well placed.
“One of the major challenges at present is the initial stage of capturing CO from other flue gases before release into the atmosphere,” said Hunter.
There are three main technologies being considered: post-combustion capture, pre-combustion capture and oxy-fuel capture, all of which are currently being developed and trialled in pilot plants around the world.
“The success of the Longannet pilot plant, which trialled post-combustion capture technology on a live power station for the first time, as well as the developments at Doosan Babcock’s oxy-fuel pilot in Renfrew, along with other R&D led by RWE npower, has put the UK on the path to taking CO capture from the pilot stage to full-scale demonstration,” she said.
“The second stage in the process involves the planning and development of the transportation infrastructure, which also presents challenges.
“This involves safely and economically transporting COto its final geological storage formation by ship, road and pipeline.
“The latter will rely on the development of suitable pipeline infrastructure spanning several hundred kilometres across land and sea. A number of UK pipeline network clusters have been proposed to serve the needs of the various power stations and heavy emitters.
“Although there are cur rently few existing shipping vessels around the world capable of handling CO, a number of studies have shown that the routing of CO pipelines in the UK is completely feasible and achievable.
“With its close proximity to North Sea storage sinks, the UK is in a strong position to establish the world’s first CCS pipeline network.”
Turning to the third stage in the CCS chain – injection and storage of CO into secure geological formations – Hunter pointed out that this would largely entail storage in depleted oil&gas fields and in saline aquifers, and that qualifying geological storage sites would be a critical part of the CCS process.
Hunter: “The North Sea has been identified as having valuable storage capacity and is expected to become the CO storage sink for Europe. Data presented by the British Geological Survey provides reassurance in the safety of storing CO offshore.
“With an estimated storage space of around 22billion tonnes, the North Sea undoubtedly presents the UK with a real opportunity to establish a lucrative CO storage industry for the whole of Europe.
“However, these estimates have to be firmed up and further qualified to unleash the true potential of the North Sea, particularly for saline aquifers, which make up the majority of estimated storage space.”
She pointed out that measurement and monitoring of CO leakage from the point of capture, through to injection into the storage formation, would play a key role in demonstrating CCS and in reducing uncertainty.
However, as reported by Energy last year, TUV NEL has identified a need to establish suitable and accurate methods to measure CO in pipelines for verification purposes.
“Once in the storage space, although current technologies can detect and locate CO leakage, there is still a need for the development of technology to accurately quantify leakage,” Hunter added.
