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Seven-company carbon dioxide research project launched BP Exploration (Alaska)’s Gardiner Hill heads up effort to find separation, storage technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions Kristen Nelson PNA News Editor
Seven global energy companies said May 4 that they have joined forces to research and develop advanced carbon dioxide separation and geologic storage technology aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The group includes BP Amoco, Chevron, Norsk Hydro, the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of companies, Statoil, Suncor Energy and Texaco.
“We share society’s concern over the issue of climate change,” the companies said in a statement. “While each member company is actively working to manage its own greenhouse gas emissions through a portfolio of initiatives, this project underscores our joint commitment to developing innovative ways to address the climate change issue. Pooling our technical and financial resources in this way will give the project added impetus.”
BP Amoco will act as project coordinator for the project. BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc.’s CO2 regional manager, Gardiner Hill, is heading up the project for the BP Amoco group.
“Alaska is somewhere potentially we could use this technology, should we be successful in developing it,” Gardiner told PNA May 5.
“Alaska clearly has a CO2 supply, a CO2 source, because of the large facilities we have (on the North Slope). And it also has potentially good sinks because of the types of reservoirs we have. …or, should we choose to use CO2 for enhanced oil recovery, it would be very effective, more effective than even NGLs in these reservoirs.”
Research project The initial $20 million, three and a half year “CO2 Capture Project” is fundamentally a research project, Gardiner said, “looking at new technology and the process to capture carbon dioxide, CO2, emissions.”
The project is aimed at removing CO2 from industrial combustion processes, “any large power process will have as a byproduct the emissions of CO2,” Gardiner said.
CO2 can be removed in a number of ways, he said. “You can do that post the combustion process. Or you could do it prior to the combustion process. And then there’s a third way, where you can actually change the type of combustion process. That’s by involving pure oxygen.” By using pure oxygen in the combustion process, he said, the byproduct is pure CO2, which is easy to capture.
Pre-combustion technology would use hydrogen as the fuel source. “So rather than put the technology at the end… you take it out up front and you do it once and then you distribute the hydrogen.”
Post-combustion technology would involve capture of CO2.
CO2 capture technology is not used wide scale in an industrial way, he said: “My read really is this is a pretty immature area of technology development. There are some examples where CO2 is captured, but it tends to be small scale and it tends to be predominately in the food processing industries, making fizzy drinks and food preparation.”
Kick off in September This project, Gardiner said, got kicked off in a big way in September when BP Amoco hosted a workshop in Houston with the U.S. Department of Energy and the International Energy Association. The workshop focused on technologies for CO2 capture and geological sequestration, he said.
At that September workshop, BP Amoco “launched the concept of forming a joint industry project where we could work in partnership — and partnership was the key … within industry and between industry and government to tackle this particular problem.”
Since then, BP Amoco has networked heavily with both government and the other companies, and in March the legal agreements were put in place and seven companies signed up to work together on this particular project.
Gardiner said that was “actually quite a short period of time to get people to that place to form a joint industry project. That’s quite remarkable. It says something about how keen we all are to undertake this venture…”
The companies involved “give this very much of an international flavor,” he said, and include companies from Norway, Europe and America representing a fair cross section of industry. He said the group may grow slightly in the future because there are other companies talking of joining.
Technology development During the first three and a half years, Gardiner said, the companies are looking for a breakthrough in the cost of CO2 capture. “And if we achieve that, we could then go into subsequent phases. We could then go into a detailed engineering study, as to what would that take to apply that technology in a field application.” A demonstration pilot could follow. “But,” he said, “these would be subsequent phases that are not part of this current program or process.”
Teams will work on different aspects of the problem. The nucleus of a team, he said, might be a contractor — but most people will be working via the Internet.
Internet access is being set up now for the first team, the research and evaluation team, Gardiner said. “The first thing we do is discover everything that’s been done in this area to date — by contractors or oil companies or research institutes — so we don’t repeat anything.”
Teams for technology types Separate teams will look at technology for the three areas of capture: pre-combustion, post-combustion and oxy fuels. There are specific technology challenges within each, Gardiner said. In addition, a team will work on a common economic model to evaluate the benefits of new technology to help determine of a technology should be applied to a given project.
And there will be a team working on storage aspects: once the CO2 is captured, what do you do with it? Can you use it productively, or do you need to store it and how do you store it safely?
All seven participants have their own examples of where they might want to use the technology, “so we’ll be using scenarios which are generic… so that we understand the types of conditions we may have to capture and store CO2.” Because participating companies will have different places they would want to use the technology, “we want to take a much broader perspective so we can put in place what are the best practices for how you handle CO2, how you store CO2 or how you use CO2.”
Broad interest expected One thing the group is considering is “what do we make public — or what can we make public?” Gardiner said.
“There are things we can share and there are some things we can’t share. There will be things which have intellectual property constraints on them and we would have to honor that, particularly in agreements with the other seven companies… things they don’t want to share we would honor that. And with the contractors who are working with technology…
“But where we can … we will attempt to share progress as it develops.”
The group plans to participate in workshops — and will be presenting, he said, at a seminar in Australia this June.
Expensive equipment One thing that is required is a high volume of carbon dioxide.
“Because the equipment is very sophisticated, it’s expensive, you need to apply it to material sources… One of the challenges, in fact, will be having concentrated large supplies … of CO2…
“Where we have very small distributed sources of CO2 … that becomes much more challenging,” Gardiner said.
The project itself involves a good deal of risk, he said.
“It shows that we’re committed to taking this seriously, we’re stepping up to the plate to take on a degree of risk and real dollars to try to do something about this. And there’s no guarantee we’ll be successful. But by getting together we stand the best possible change of being successful.
“And we’re taking this on because we do feel it’s important and there’s a degree of risk in doing that and we’re prepared to do that as a group.”
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