Kyoto and beyond
Capturing carbon
We have the technology, why aren't we doing it?
Last Updated February 7, 2007
CBC News
Scientists call it carbon sequestration — a big geological word that means putting the gaseous carbon dioxide from fossil fuels back in the ground where it came from, rather than in the atmosphere where it is contributing to global warming.
In the battle to contain climate change, pumping carbon dioxide (CO2) back into old coal seams or natural gas reservoirs has become one of the hot topics among scientific and government planners.
The Bush administration in Washington has just sped up its $2 billion Clean Coal initiative and says it wants a sequestration strategy in place by 2012. As well, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change touts sequestration as one of the important mitigating factors for climate change and points out that Canada, with its wealth of tapped-out oil and gas wells, provides a natural home.
But the high costs that go along with trapping CO2 at the smokestack, compressing it into pipelines and then shipping it to a disposal site where it can be injected deep into an underground cavern are making energy execs and utility managers nervous.
Source: UN For a big coal-fired utility that emits 20 million tonnes of CO2 a year, such as Ontario's aging Nanticoke or Alberta's Sundance, a six-unit generating plant that burns 250 rail cars' worth of coal every day, this could mean a $1-billion retrofit, albeit one that would be passed along to consumers over 40 years or so.
Indeed, the arguments for and against sequestration are not unlike those for insulating homes: It's one thing to insist on much higher energy standards for next year's subdivisions (read the next generation of coal-fired power plants), quite another to go in and redo a draughty, old ranch-style bungalow from the 1950s.
It's working now
Still, there are three big capture programs already underway in the world, not to mention scores of more modest pilot projects, including some in Canada that have been on the go since the late 1990s. The big three:
But their real beauty is that they show carbon capture can take place across the full range of energy production — from extraction to electricity generation — which in Canada's case accounts for 82 per cent of the greenhouse gases we pump into the environment each year.
"Technically this is really quite feasible," says Malcolm Wilson, an energy expert at the University of Regina and the director of CO2 management at the Energy Innovation Network, a business-government partnership.
What's stopping us, he says, is which industry "is willing to go first" — in the process probably driving up its costs more than a competitor's.
Too much geography
Canada is particularly suited for carbon sequestration, the UN's International Energy Agency has noted. Our theoretical deposit sites are enough for 1,300 billion tonnes of CO2, which is well over a century's worth.
Most of these sites are in the Western Canadian sedimentary basin, home to the oil patch. But as the Norwegians are demonstrating, offshore injection is also a live option.
Would carbon capture work in Alberta's tar sands, home to $100 billion in anticipated energy development? Yes, says Wilson, but the corporate impact would be uneven.
Older tar sands developers such as Syncrude and Suncor use an extraction technology with a particularly pure stream of CO2, which would make it more economical for them than their competitors to separate that particular greenhouse gas from other by-products. (This assumes, of course, that all tar sands operators would be forced by some kind of climate-change regulation to cap their GHG emissions at similar rates.)
Would the techniques work in Canada's 21 coal-fired generating plants, which together account for 129 million tonnes (17 per cent) of the country's GHG emissions a year? Same answer.
Not only does the cost vary considerably depending on the type of coal or technique (coal gasification vs. simple burning) used, but geography enters the equation as well.
Studies by the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board have noted that the province's big coal utilities are ideally sited near potential CO2 disposal sites. The four equivalent utilities in Ontario would probably have to run CO2 pipelines into the U.S. to find appropriately deep deposit sites (typically a kilometre or more below the surface).
In the grand Canadian scheme it may not matter much if Alberta has a relative CO2 disposal advantage over Ontario (which has more cleaner energy options in hydro and nuclear it can turn to).
But if Ottawa is to enforce some kind of CO2 containment scheme, these kinds of geographically dictated costs could have a huge impact on smaller provinces or on those with high energy-using exporters, like a steel mill, where a 10 to 40 per cent increase in the electricity bill (depending on the age and type of plant that's being retrofitted) could make the difference between whether a prime employer stays put or relocates to sunnier climes.
Tomorrow's job, or today's?
We've heard all these arguments before, of course, during the acid rain debates and in the acrimony over mercury and other pollutants, utilities said they couldn't afford to put on scrubbers to contain the noxious chemicals going up their flues — particularly if our American competitors weren't doing this at the same time.
Carbon dioxide is the last of the untrapped combustion gases "and the reason there is so much research going on right now," says Pete McGrail, one of the top carbon scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., is that the processes for conventional coal plants are still very expensive. Capture and sequestration can add as much as 40 per cent to the cost of electricity at the plant gate, he says.
These costs come down considerably, by more than half, when you talk tomorrow's technology — coal gasification — and particularly when you site the plant near an appropriate injection seam to sequester the unwanted CO2.
That's starting to happen, McGrail says. The U.S. government is sponsoring a clean coal initiative called FuturGen to have a totally GHG-free power plant within the next decade, and U.S. utilities are beginning to take underground storage into consideration when they propose new plants.
"The bottom line is that we can get to stabilization of atmospheric CO2 concentrations and we can do that far cheaper and with far less economic impact in both the developed and developing world if we were to deploy large-scale captures of CO2," says McGrail.
The U.S., of course, has the luxury of not being a signatory to Kyoto: It can think in terms of 50- and 100-year timelines and of beginning a carbon clampdown in a decade or so when the new technology is fully explored.
From a Canadian policy point of view — the dilemma facing a likely election-bound Stephen Harper — can you just let the future take care of itself?
The cost of storing carbon
According to the UN's energy and climate experts, the cost of capturing CO2 is between $25 US and $60 US a tonne for conventional coal-fired plants. For the next generation what are called combined cycle gasification coal plants, of which there are only a handful in the world, the cost comes down to $25 US to $40 US a tonne.
These are from studies made about two years ago and some experts say costs have come down since. So these same figures might well be applied in Canadian currency.
For consumers, says Wilson, this would translate into something like a 20 per cent increase in your home electricity bill, given the way these bills are blended and how costs are amortized over time.
But for the utilities or energy companies that would have to put out the capital outlay for capture technology, these are big amounts to bite off.
The production and use of fossil fuels for electricity in this country accounts for 82 per cent, or approximately 622 million tonnes, of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions each year. Most of that is CO2.
At the low end of $25 a tonne, that would be a $15.5-billion outlay. At $60 a tonne, you're looking at a staggering $37-billion capital expense.
Of course, Canadian industry doesn't have to abate every bit of carbon emanating from its smokestacks. To get down to the Kyoto target of 572 million tonnes of emissions from the current 758 level, Canada only has to capture and sequester, for example, 186 million tonnes.
Assume, for the moment, that all of this falls on the shoulders of the energy industry and fossil fuel-burning power utilities.
At $25 a tonne, the cost is a much more manageable $4.6 billion, but the trick would be finding the appropriate targets, selected from among different companies or utilities in different sectors and provinces, to get the most bang for your buck. That would be a real Made-in-Canada solution.
Capturing carbon
We have the technology, why aren't we doing it?
Last Updated February 7, 2007
CBC News
Scientists call it carbon sequestration — a big geological word that means putting the gaseous carbon dioxide from fossil fuels back in the ground where it came from, rather than in the atmosphere where it is contributing to global warming.
In the battle to contain climate change, pumping carbon dioxide (CO2) back into old coal seams or natural gas reservoirs has become one of the hot topics among scientific and government planners.
The Bush administration in Washington has just sped up its $2 billion Clean Coal initiative and says it wants a sequestration strategy in place by 2012. As well, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change touts sequestration as one of the important mitigating factors for climate change and points out that Canada, with its wealth of tapped-out oil and gas wells, provides a natural home.
But the high costs that go along with trapping CO2 at the smokestack, compressing it into pipelines and then shipping it to a disposal site where it can be injected deep into an underground cavern are making energy execs and utility managers nervous.
Indeed, the arguments for and against sequestration are not unlike those for insulating homes: It's one thing to insist on much higher energy standards for next year's subdivisions (read the next generation of coal-fired power plants), quite another to go in and redo a draughty, old ranch-style bungalow from the 1950s.
It's working now
Still, there are three big capture programs already underway in the world, not to mention scores of more modest pilot projects, including some in Canada that have been on the go since the late 1990s. The big three:
- Norway's national oil company is stripping one million tonnes a year of CO2 from the natural gas it is mining under the North Sea and re-injecting it back into empty wells.
- British Petroleum is doing the same with an oil well in Algeria and planning a similar project in California.
- And a (coal-gasification) utility in Beulah, North Dakota, is shipping approximately 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 each year over 200 kilometres by pipeline to our very own Weyburn, Sask., where it is being re-injected into an old oil field to help with the recovery of new deposits.
But their real beauty is that they show carbon capture can take place across the full range of energy production — from extraction to electricity generation — which in Canada's case accounts for 82 per cent of the greenhouse gases we pump into the environment each year.
"Technically this is really quite feasible," says Malcolm Wilson, an energy expert at the University of Regina and the director of CO2 management at the Energy Innovation Network, a business-government partnership.
What's stopping us, he says, is which industry "is willing to go first" — in the process probably driving up its costs more than a competitor's.
Too much geography
Canada is particularly suited for carbon sequestration, the UN's International Energy Agency has noted. Our theoretical deposit sites are enough for 1,300 billion tonnes of CO2, which is well over a century's worth.
Most of these sites are in the Western Canadian sedimentary basin, home to the oil patch. But as the Norwegians are demonstrating, offshore injection is also a live option.
Would carbon capture work in Alberta's tar sands, home to $100 billion in anticipated energy development? Yes, says Wilson, but the corporate impact would be uneven.
Older tar sands developers such as Syncrude and Suncor use an extraction technology with a particularly pure stream of CO2, which would make it more economical for them than their competitors to separate that particular greenhouse gas from other by-products. (This assumes, of course, that all tar sands operators would be forced by some kind of climate-change regulation to cap their GHG emissions at similar rates.)
Would the techniques work in Canada's 21 coal-fired generating plants, which together account for 129 million tonnes (17 per cent) of the country's GHG emissions a year? Same answer.
Not only does the cost vary considerably depending on the type of coal or technique (coal gasification vs. simple burning) used, but geography enters the equation as well.
Studies by the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board have noted that the province's big coal utilities are ideally sited near potential CO2 disposal sites. The four equivalent utilities in Ontario would probably have to run CO2 pipelines into the U.S. to find appropriately deep deposit sites (typically a kilometre or more below the surface).
In the grand Canadian scheme it may not matter much if Alberta has a relative CO2 disposal advantage over Ontario (which has more cleaner energy options in hydro and nuclear it can turn to).
But if Ottawa is to enforce some kind of CO2 containment scheme, these kinds of geographically dictated costs could have a huge impact on smaller provinces or on those with high energy-using exporters, like a steel mill, where a 10 to 40 per cent increase in the electricity bill (depending on the age and type of plant that's being retrofitted) could make the difference between whether a prime employer stays put or relocates to sunnier climes.
Tomorrow's job, or today's?
We've heard all these arguments before, of course, during the acid rain debates and in the acrimony over mercury and other pollutants, utilities said they couldn't afford to put on scrubbers to contain the noxious chemicals going up their flues — particularly if our American competitors weren't doing this at the same time.
Carbon dioxide is the last of the untrapped combustion gases "and the reason there is so much research going on right now," says Pete McGrail, one of the top carbon scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., is that the processes for conventional coal plants are still very expensive. Capture and sequestration can add as much as 40 per cent to the cost of electricity at the plant gate, he says.
These costs come down considerably, by more than half, when you talk tomorrow's technology — coal gasification — and particularly when you site the plant near an appropriate injection seam to sequester the unwanted CO2.
That's starting to happen, McGrail says. The U.S. government is sponsoring a clean coal initiative called FuturGen to have a totally GHG-free power plant within the next decade, and U.S. utilities are beginning to take underground storage into consideration when they propose new plants.
"The bottom line is that we can get to stabilization of atmospheric CO2 concentrations and we can do that far cheaper and with far less economic impact in both the developed and developing world if we were to deploy large-scale captures of CO2," says McGrail.
The U.S., of course, has the luxury of not being a signatory to Kyoto: It can think in terms of 50- and 100-year timelines and of beginning a carbon clampdown in a decade or so when the new technology is fully explored.
From a Canadian policy point of view — the dilemma facing a likely election-bound Stephen Harper — can you just let the future take care of itself?
The cost of storing carbon
According to the UN's energy and climate experts, the cost of capturing CO2 is between $25 US and $60 US a tonne for conventional coal-fired plants. For the next generation what are called combined cycle gasification coal plants, of which there are only a handful in the world, the cost comes down to $25 US to $40 US a tonne.
These are from studies made about two years ago and some experts say costs have come down since. So these same figures might well be applied in Canadian currency.
For consumers, says Wilson, this would translate into something like a 20 per cent increase in your home electricity bill, given the way these bills are blended and how costs are amortized over time.
But for the utilities or energy companies that would have to put out the capital outlay for capture technology, these are big amounts to bite off.
The production and use of fossil fuels for electricity in this country accounts for 82 per cent, or approximately 622 million tonnes, of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions each year. Most of that is CO2.
At the low end of $25 a tonne, that would be a $15.5-billion outlay. At $60 a tonne, you're looking at a staggering $37-billion capital expense.
Of course, Canadian industry doesn't have to abate every bit of carbon emanating from its smokestacks. To get down to the Kyoto target of 572 million tonnes of emissions from the current 758 level, Canada only has to capture and sequester, for example, 186 million tonnes.
Assume, for the moment, that all of this falls on the shoulders of the energy industry and fossil fuel-burning power utilities.
At $25 a tonne, the cost is a much more manageable $4.6 billion, but the trick would be finding the appropriate targets, selected from among different companies or utilities in different sectors and provinces, to get the most bang for your buck. That would be a real Made-in-Canada solution.
