Once again, we in the US have been chastised by President Bush for being addicted to foreign oil. President Bush spoke at the March 5, 2008 International Renewable Energy Conference in Washington, a gathering of world energy officials. He told attendees: “We have to get off oil, America has to change its habits.” He went on to say: “It should be obvious to everyone, the demand has outstripped the supply, which is driving prices up.”

He is correct; We are addicted to oil. We complain about the prices of gasoline and electricity, while eighty-five percent of us believe that global warming is real and caused by humans. We have not broken the chains of driving our cars or heating our homes energy inefficiently. This is mainly because we are not offered affordable alternative energy to break these addictions. President Bush’s main bet is on ethanol, but now we are seeing rising food prices as our corn goes into fuel production, and is now projected to be as polluting as gasoline. The saving grace of it is that it keeps our dollars in the United States.

President Bush can hardly take credit for promoting renewable energy when he has delayed incentives like production tax credits and refuses to limit carbon dioxide emissions. President Bush reiterated his call for a global cap on carbon dioxide, the main gas behind global warming, but said the United States should not act until nations like China and India do as well. It’s actions like these that make one wonder if we will ever break the chains of addiction.

We are currently a second tier player in alternative energy adoption and need government incentives to move to the top tier. We will have a new administration in January 2009 that will hopefully be more supportive of alternative energy. It’s a good bet that your first moves will be a “cap and tax” bill, but one that should include incentives to help the solar, wind and geothermal industries. It will take time for alternative energies to gain traction. This means that we will be dependent on coal as a fuel for electricity generation for much longer than we would like.

We will have to stop or reduce carbon dioxide pollution if we are going to use coal for a longer period when oil becomes scarcer and out of affordable reach. This brings us to questions about the readiness of the much touted carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The premise sounds great for allowing and maintaining a quality of life that we are used to and desire.

An overview of CCS technology is quite simple. Carbon dioxide is captured from fossil fuels before burning or in the fireplace. The CO2 is transported through pipelines or perhaps becomes a solid at the generation site. The captured gas is then compressed and buried in a repository to prevent it from escaping into the atmosphere.

CO2 capture

Post Combustion Capture – Effluent gases from a fossil fuel power plant can be scrubbed to remove CO2 and captured for transport to the intended repository.

Pre-combustion capture: Fossil fuel is partially oxidized before combustion. The resulting CO2 can be captured in a relatively pure exhaust stream.

Oxygen Field Combustion: Fuel burns in oxygen instead of air. To limit the resulting flame temperatures to levels common during conventional combustion, the cooled flue gas is recalculated and injected into the combustion chamber. The flue gas consists mainly of carbon dioxide and water vapor, the latter of which is condensed through cooling. The result is a nearly pure carbon dioxide stream that can be transported to the sequestration site and stored.

These capture technologies are well known and examples of their use can be pointed out today. The cost of these techniques, however, will be high. There will be additional capital costs to install the technology. Depending on the capture technology, the energy cost to drive the capture techniques can add 10-40% additional energy costs. The cost of energy could be double what we know today.

CO2 Gas Transportation

This technology consists, in a very simple way, of pipes that will transport CO2 gas from the generation plant to the reservoir for storage.

the reservoir

Here we have a large number of proposals, but none have been tested in a large-scale demonstration. Proposals range from caverns on earth to the ocean. The proposal is to compress CO2 gas and then either store it as a gas or react it in a carbonaceous mineral such as limestone for storage. It is estimated that this procedure will add another 30 to 40% to the energy cost in addition to gas capture.

Storage Projects in Operation

There are several CO2 storage projects in operation. Sleeper is the oldest project (1996) and is located in the North Sea, where Norway’s StatoilHydro extracts carbon dioxide from natural gas with amine solvents and disposes of this carbon dioxide in a deep saline aquifer. Since 1996, Sleipner has stored around one million tons of CO2 per year. A second project at the Snohvit gas field stores 700,000 tons per year.

The Weyburn project is currently the largest carbon capture and storage project in the world. Started in 2000, Weyburn is located on an oil deposit discovered in 1954 in southeastern Canada. CO2 from this project is captured at the Great Plains coal gasification plant in Beulah, North Dakota, which has produced methane from coal for more than 30 years. The first phase finished in 2004 and demonstrated that CO2 can be stored underground at the site safely and indefinitely.

Future projects

A major Canadian initiative called the Integrated CO2 Network (ICO2N) is a proposed system for the capture, transport and storage of carbon dioxide (CO2). ICO2N is an alliance of the 15 largest Canadian industrial companies and the Canadian government. The Alliance has existed for two years.

The ICO2N alliance has as its declared objective to be the “World Leader in the implementation of Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage”. Their goal is to eliminate 60% of Alberta’s CO2 emissions and also improve oil recovery from mature oil fields. The first phase of operation is planned for 2012-2015.

In October 2007, the University of Texas at Austin’s Bureau of Economic Geology was awarded a 10-year, $38 million subcontract to carry out the first intensively monitored long-term project in the United States studying the feasibility of injecting a large volume of CO2 for underground storage. The project is a research program of the Southeast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (SECARB), funded by the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Energy Technology Laboratory. The SECARB partnership will demonstrate CO2 injection rate and storage capacity in the Tuscaloosa-Woodbine geological system that stretches from Texas to Florida. The region has the potential to store more than 200 billion tons]of CO2. Physical work began in late 2007.

FutureGen was a US government project announced by President Bush in 2003 to build a near-zero emissions coal-fired power plant to produce hydrogen and electricity while using carbon capture and storage. In December 2007, Mattoon Township, Coles County, Illinois, was chosen as the site for the plant out of four finalists in Illinois and Texas. Unfortunately, on January 29, 2008, the Department of Energy announced that it was defunding FutureGen, effectively ending the project. The Department of Energy has stated that the demonstration was canceled because costs had climbed to $1.5 billion and it did not believe a demonstration of the technology was now needed. The DOE has requested that existing power plants submit proposals to install CCS and be operational in 2015-2016.

carbon dioxide capture research

Carbon dioxide capture is the most expensive component of the technology and is receiving focus from researchers around the world. UCLA researcher Omar Yaghti has developed ZIF materials that can absorb 80 times their weight in carbon dioxide. After absorption, the material can be decompressed and the CO2 released.

Research at the University of Texas at Austin, led by Professor Gary Rochelle, has developed a chemical process that will absorb carbon dioxide and release it when the mixture boils. There are many other examples of these new technologies under investigation to capture carbon dioxide and surely many others to demonstrate.

Summary

Carbon dioxide capture and storage is a well-proven technology that is ready for large-scale implementation. The cost of scrubbing exhaust or preburned fuel and compression of CO2 Gs will increase energy costs by 40-60% over raw and stored CO2 technology. There are dozens of researchers working to develop materials that can absorb the CO2 gas in the chimney and avoid the energy cost of cleaning. These developments are a minimum of seven to ten years away. We better encourage this development, because it will be 10-15 years before they are implemented after they start.