CCS around the world

Little new CCS in near future

In April 2022 there were five larger projects under construction according to the pro-CCS Australian think tank, the Global CCS Institute and its database CO₂RE.

Two of them are in Norway, involving the capture of 0.4 Mton/yr at a cement factory, plus a storage facility.

Of the 3 non-Norwegian projects, one is the ZEROS project in Texas(1), for which there is little detail. This is a “proposed” project (for operation in 2023) not yet under construction. A “diverse range of waste fuels” will be burned in 2x120 MW boilers.

Sinopec Qili(2) in China is a chemical plant, and will use the CO₂ for enhanced oil recovery. It will send 0.5 Mton of CO₂ per year into the ground, but the extra oil would emit roughly the same amount. It is said to be operative in 2021. It is still "under construction" by April 2022 according to CO₂RE.
Guodian Taizhou(3), also in China, is a 4000 MW coal power station which at full utilisation emits some 20 Mtons per year. Of this, 0.5 Mton would be captured and mainly used for enhanced oil recovery. It is said to be operating “in the early 2020s”.

Santos Cooper Moomba(4) CCS in Australia is another gas processing plant, aiming to capture 1.7 Mton/year from 2023. It has been under consideration since at least 2006, but was announced in the Glassgow COP. It is eligible for carbon credits under a government scheme, and has also received a direct federal subsidy. It has been called a "scam" by the Australia Institute as it may be used for enhanced oil recovery.

A Louisiana project(5) for blue hydrogen is also in the CO2RE as under construction for "expected" operation 2025-26, very big and very vague, and can not be considered as really under construction.
At best, all projects now classified as under construction (excluing Louisiana) would store 4. Mtons per year. For comparison, global CO₂ emissions are about 31,500 Mtons/yr. The shift to renewables has reduced global CO₂ emissions by 1348 Mtons between 2016 and 2020, and by 440 Mton in 2020 alone, according to the IEA .

CCS Australia: Oil & gas industry asks for more

The Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association (APPEA) – a leading lobby group for the oil and gas industry – has called for more government support to be provided to carbon capture and storage projects from the Morrison government.

Their one project so far is the Gorgon LNG CCS (6), which came far too late and captured far too little CO₂ to meet the conditions for government approval back in 2009. Chevron and its partners have agreed to buy carbon credits likely to cost more than 180 million USD as a penalty for failing to meet a five-year target for carbon capture and storage, according to Reuters. This is on top of the 2.3 billion USD investment in the CCS plant. Reuters also said that by November 2020 Gorgon had captured 5.5 million tonnes, which indicates that it operated at about half capacity during the first two years and a few months.

Though CCS is hardly a success story so far, the APPEA wants more of it and more taxpayer money, this time for “blue hydrogen”, i.e. hydrogen produced from natural gas with CCS.

Other Australian companies are betting on green hydrogen, electrolysis of water from wind and solar electricity. The plans are huge, with a project pipeline of 69 GW of electrolyser capacity (equivalent to 69 nuclear power reactors), according to Rystad Energy. This is ahead of Europe, where green hydrogen projects are also popping up at bewildering speed. It is too early to tell how many of the plans will eventually materialise.

Australia is heading for a war between Blue and Green hydrogen, of global significance. The Blues fired the first shot in January 2022 with a project(7) for hydrogen from brown coal to be exported on a liquid hydrogen ship to Japan. The project is being led by a Japanese-Australian consortium including Japan’s J-Power, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Shell and AGL.

A “world-first that would make Australia a global leader”, commented Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
But as Tim Baxter, a senior researcher for climate solutions at the Climate Council told the Guardian: “Hydrogen derived from fossil fuel sources, like what is being shipped out of the LaTrobe Valley, which is derived from some of the world’s dirtiest coal, is really just a new fossil fuel industry.”

Australia ex-PM: CCS a scam and a con

Australia is the top world coal exporter and has long been very supportive of CCS, having spent several billion dollars on the technology and on propaganda for it.
Not all of its politicians agree.

“Now this is a scam and a con. CCS is a proven failure,” said Malcolm Turnbull, prime minister of the right-centre Liberal government between 2015 and 2018, according to the Canberra Times.
Turnbull was talking specifically about “blue hydrogen”, which is made from fossil fuels with the CO₂ captured and stored, but also about CCS in general.

Midwest Carbon Express – huge CCS pipeline project

A 2000-mile Midwest Carbon Express project(8) intends to coalesce the carbon dioxide emissions from 31 ethanol plants in five states and ship it to North Dakota . The project, announced last summer, with additional detail in January 2022, is led by agri-business leader Bruce Rastetter, who is a well-known donor to the Republican Party, and his companies Summit Agricultural Group and Summit Carbon.
One corner of the proposed grid goes to Decatur, Illinois where agri-giant ADM now has an ethanol plant with CCS. It is the only significant bioenergy CCS (BECSS) plant in the world, and one of only five major CSS plants in the world that is not used for enhanced oil recovery. Its permit only runs until 2022 and for a maximum of 5.5 Mtons stored, so its future is far from secure.

The Summit Carbon pipeline network would capture and transport up to 12 Mtons of CO₂ per year, which would make it the biggest CCS project in the world, by far.

The environmental movement is against the project for various reasons. The Sierra Club in Iowa, which is at the centre of the project, has stated that

“CCS is a false solution in this instance because:

• It does not address other emissions or forms of pollution from fossil fuel extraction and industrial agriculture
• It will allow for the extension of fossil fuel extraction through enhanced oil recovery
• Fails to acknowledge CO₂ is incredibly dangerous and a pipeline leak or break could poison surrounding communities and first responders.”

The Sierra Club Iowa claims to have found strong indications that the CO₂ will be used for enhanced oil recovery.

Even if it is actually heading for dedicated geological storage, it is not a big net sink for CO₂. Ethanol from corn without CCS is only 46 per cent less carbon intensive than gasoline, according to a recent study from Harvard and Tufts quoted by agribusiness sources. Whether that would be better or worse after a proposed CCS scheme depends on a number of assumptions about the fate of the captured CO₂, sources of energy for heat and electricity and agricultural practices.

CCS Institute:Less CCS in operation in 2021

The CCS Institute, a think tank, or PR organisation, for the CCS Industry in Australia publishes an annual report, Global Status of CCS, on developments in the field.

Not much has happened, it appears.

Since the start of Gorgon LNG CCS in Australia in 2019, four years late, there has been no further new CCS capacity in the world up to September 2021. The capacity declined somewhat in 2020 and stayed there during 2021 to judge from a diagram of worldwide capture capacity, at about 37 Mton/year.

The drop during 2020 can be attributed to the coal power retrofitted CCS plant Petra Nova in Texas, with a capacity of 1.4 Mtons per year. It was suspended in 2020.

Most of the 37 million tonnes are for enhanced oil recovery. Capture capacity does not mean that 37 Mtons were actually captured.

If any other major CCS project was brought into operation, it is not included in the CCS Institute’s database. The database does however contain a long list of “completed” projects and a few examples of “operation suspended”, one of which is Petra Nova. (See AN2/21.)

The Global Status report 2021 did not have much news, but it did carry a two-page endorsement of CCS by HRH Prince Charles. The message conveyed is that “The sooner we include carbon capture use and storage technologies into the fold of wide-spread decarbonisation initiatives, the more likely we will be able to achieve Paris agreement climate targets and get to net zero emissions”.