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« Bengtsson speaks | Main | Curry in Quadrant »
Wednesday
May212014

The Yeomen's report

Tim Yeo and the merry men of the Commons' Energy and Climate Change Committee have released their report into carbon capture and storage. The conclusions are pretty much as you might expect, with the committee calling for the government to bung money at CCS companies and to do it quickly, quickly, quickly. The interesting bit, however, was always going to be the bit on the technical challenges. And also much as you might expect this is buried and consists largely of brushing the problems under the carpet:

It was repeatedly asserted that scientific and engineering challenges were not major factors preventing the development of CCS. Mr Warren CEO of the CCSA argued that the number of CCS projects operating or under construction around the world,“gives us a high degree of confidence that this is not a technical or scientific challenge”. Despite this there is limited experience in integrating the components which make up CCS into full-chain projects. Ongoing research and development will be critical to drive improvements...

This is followed by an extended discussion about storage capacity for carbon dioxide in the UK and ultimate acceptance that "scientific and engineering challenges are not a major barrier to deploying CCS".

Are they serious?

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Reader Comments (86)

If it could work it doesn't need taxpayer input; investors would be falling over themselves to get a slice.
Imagine a private company comes to you and says "There is a huge worldwide problem that the world is spending trillions of dollars to reduce. I am developing a product that will go a long way to solve this problem. It will therefore be worth many billions of dollars. But I'm not going to keep working on it unless you give me some money."
How dumb would you have to be to fall for that?

May 21, 2014 at 4:52 PM | Unregistered CommenterAlex

Yet another reason to vote UKIP, the only party with enough gumption to reject CCS.

May 21, 2014 at 5:04 PM | Unregistered CommenterJulius Nebbins BSc(Eng)

"James Verdon is telling me on Twitter that I should be focusing on cost, not engineering as the biggest issue for CCS."

Perhaps he means "focusing on cost and not the (scientific) feasibility of the plan". In other words, cost, rather than can it be done at all?

Cost is an integral part of Engineering, that also includes the timeliness of delivery and the quality of the finished product. Costs include the cost of construction, running and maintaining production as well as all the ongoing H&S aspects, like storing a gas, in high concentration, under high pressure, for considerable periods of time. There is also the cost of regulation. I am sure any government agency would apply quite a hefty charge on the naissant industry!

And there are also external factors to consider, like the untimely removal of subsidies!

Engineers work in the real world.

May 21, 2014 at 5:40 PM | Registered CommenterRobert Christopher

There is no way to get back to reality by technical or engineering argument.

The only way to change it is political. Imagine how long any of this kind of nonsense would last if Ukip's Roger Helmer was the energy minister.

May 21, 2014 at 5:45 PM | Unregistered Commenterdave

Vote UKip, it was also keep the Bish in some pocket money

May 21, 2014 at 6:04 PM | Unregistered CommenterSteve

I'd like to know how successful they have been on running an oil lubricated turbine on oxygen.
May 21, 2014 at 3:50 PM | Unregistered CommenterMD

I think their plan is to pass the hot CO2 through the turbine.

May 21, 2014 at 6:16 PM | Unregistered Commentersplitpin

James Verdon is telling me on Twitter that I should be focusing on cost, not engineering as the biggest issue for CCS.

But according to Public Sector Economics™ the cost is also a benefit, especially if it can be put "on the tab".

May 21, 2014 at 6:29 PM | Unregistered CommenterJake Haye

Cost and partcularly energy cost.

Obviously its possible to take all the CO2 and turn it back into coal, by burning even MORE coal!


A sort of 'economic growth and debt' model ;-)

To pay off your debts, simply borrow MORE MONEY.

You know it makes sense..

May 21, 2014 at 7:39 PM | Unregistered CommenterLeo Smith

I think the snake oil in the NetPower scheme is that they consider the oxygen to be a fuel and therefore don't add the inefficiency of obtaining it into their efficiency chart. The result is that the process (fuel in > CO2 out) appears to be more efficient than any other generating process whilst offering 'built-in' carbon capture. Why would any MP be interested in where an 'oxyfuel' comes from? It's just another fuel isn't it?

The oxygen used will have to be high purity (ie no nitrogen) if they are to avoid scrubbing for oxides of nitrogen in the exhaust and as people above have pointed out, oxygen rich fluids are highly dangerous.

I suspect that if derivation of the oxygen fuel is added into the efficiency equation NetPower will slip many places down the efficiency table.

May 21, 2014 at 8:51 PM | Unregistered CommenterBilly Liar

Billy Liar,
Anyone promoting O2 as a fuel should be fired on the spot for irretrievable ignorance. While the climate obsession relies implicitly on the ignorance of its believers, I find it difficult to accept the idea that anyone anywhere could ever confuse the oxidant with the fuel.

May 21, 2014 at 9:06 PM | Unregistered Commenterhunt

I did have some figures for energy use for oxygen separation from air - there are different ways of doing it, such as vacuum swing adsorption and pressure swing adsorption, and which is economic depends on scale - but don't have access to them from home; it's not an insignificant cost. I don't think anyone's tried doing it on the scale needed for a large power station.

May 21, 2014 at 9:06 PM | Unregistered CommenterDaveS

About a year ago, the Australian Broadcasting Commission did a short piece on a new govt department devoted to carbon capture and storage.
The gist of it was..the temporary director was paid a bombshell of money..and moved on..they were spending big money on dinners and travel..more than 50 million had been burnt through..and they had nothing to show other than a small "working" physical model..which wasnt doing anything.
Yet they were quite willing to travel..and eat well..and "keep the dream alive."
Beyond Parody.

May 21, 2014 at 9:30 PM | Unregistered CommenterDrapetomania

Energy required to extract oxygen from air: Table 2.1: The energy consumption of oxygen and nitrogen production.

(From http://liquidair.org.uk/full-report/report-chapter-two )

May 21, 2014 at 9:57 PM | Unregistered Commentersplitpin

I have this mental image of the idiot members of the Yeo HO HO Old Boys Club sitting about a sumptious committee room somewhere in the depths of the Westminster Palace verbalising their their justifications for stuffing genies back into bottles.
Are these people allowed out without their minders?

May 21, 2014 at 10:16 PM | Unregistered CommenterAlexander K

Sep 20, 2013

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-20/norway-drops-moon-landing-as-mongstad-carbon-capture-scrapped.html

The effort was criticized this week by the nation’s Auditor General, which said the test center project was 1.7 billion kroner over budget, according to a statement on Sept. 17. In total, the government said it has spent about 7.2 billion kroner on carbon capture, including 1.2 billion kroner on the full scale project.

At 10 Kr to the £ I need more fingers.

https://sequestration.mit.edu/tools/projects/statoil_mongstad.html

Phase 2: The Norwegian oil and energy ministry has announced that it has dropped plans for the full-scale CCS plant at the Mongstad refinery after cost overruns and delays. The government will increase spending on the carbon test center at the plant by 400 million kroner ($68 million) and will seek to build a full-scale plant in another location.

Old news but the numbers are still the same.

May 21, 2014 at 10:38 PM | Unregistered CommenterMartyn

The Swedes recently backed out of CCS. I informed DECC of this. I got no reply nor indeed an acknowledgement. Feel free. Just piss my money away.

May 21, 2014 at 10:45 PM | Unregistered CommenterJeremy Poynton

"I find it difficult to accept the idea that anyone anywhere could ever confuse the oxidant with the fuel."

And I thought it was CO2 that made things hotter..

May 21, 2014 at 11:04 PM | Registered Commenterjamesp

That's like arguing that a cure for cancer is guaranteed because so many others are working on the same problem.

May 21, 2014 at 11:53 PM | Unregistered CommenterWill Nitschke

Mongstad has a track history of being a sink for write-offs. The original refinery had a massive cost overrun in an upgrading project about 25 years ago, causing a $500 million writedown for Statoil - a unit of profligacy which became colloquially known as a "Mong".

It is of course Shell who stand to gain the lion's share of the £1.25bn of taxpayer money promised by DECC on CCS. Lord Oxbrugh is an ex-Chairman, and James Smith now of the Carbon Trust was Chairman of Shell UK. A £100m installment was confirmed in February for engineering design

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/peterhead-carbon-capture-and-storage-project

The plan is to guarantee sufficiently high power prices to the project to make it profitable - just like windmills really.

May 22, 2014 at 12:25 AM | Unregistered CommenterIt doesn't add up...

May 21, 2014 at 6:16 PM | splitpin
I think their plan is to pass the hot CO2 through the turbine.

I know their schematic shows the combustion chamber upstream of the turbine, but that's not reality for a gas turbine. In reality there is a compression section and an exhaust section with the combustion stage in between. Google "ccgt gas turbine" and look at the various images to see all sorts of configurations, but all based on the theme I've described.

May 22, 2014 at 12:55 AM | Unregistered CommenterMD

I went through all these arguments 20 years' ago with the top Japanese engineers working for MITI. The costs are horrendous.

May 22, 2014 at 7:08 AM | Unregistered CommenterSpartacusisfree

I had spoken twice to Tim Yeo after the AR5 review and a previous meeting. He seemed to agree that there were worrying inadequacies and contradictions from the Met office's contributor to the inquisition. He did not seem to have any difficulty in understanding the basics of the fact that the equatorial Atlantic would become warmer if there was less cloud cover mid summer - we both agreed that most 4 year olds would be able to understand this. He may even have had his private concerns about the E&CC committees secretariat dismissing a significant change to the planets largest weather system as being a 'regional event', despite this matter encompassing at least one third of the planets circumference and reaching from the equator to the arctic. My conclusion is that TY is a career politician that gets a bit more dosh and a higher profile if he heads a committee, but in reality he is following a doctrine known as POLR, or path of least resistance. Do not expect too much from him - there is not too much there.

May 22, 2014 at 7:38 AM | Unregistered CommenterConor McMenemie

If CCS requires (say) 10% of energy produced by a power station to drive the process then we will need 10% more power stations to match demand while raising the cost of power by 10%. The cost of running the process could make the cost of developing it look like peanuts.

May 22, 2014 at 8:23 AM | Unregistered Commenterssat

Everybody is forgetting one thing; Greens know that CCS works because Gaia used it to create chalk and limestone. The White Cliffs of Dover prove it can be done, and who are we to stand in Gaia's way?

May 22, 2014 at 8:34 AM | Unregistered CommenterRoy

EU Election

In case anyone hear has not noticed. There's an EU election today.
Please PLEASE vote. Please also encourage your friends and family to vote.
I'm not going to say which party, but do I need to?

May 22, 2014 at 8:35 AM | Registered CommenterMikeHaseler

CMc

"there is not too much there"

Tim nice-but-dim, perhaps. Although 'nice' might be debatable...

May 22, 2014 at 9:01 AM | Registered Commenterjamesp

Leo Smith (May 21, 2014 at 7:39 PM):

To pay off your debts, simply borrow MORE MONEY.
Do not dismiss that as a plan no-one would be daft enough to implement – that WAS Gordon Brown’s solution to our troubles a scant few years ago. What makes it so frightening is that that attitude is still prevalent amongst the politicos.

May 22, 2014 at 9:25 AM | Unregistered CommenterRadical Rodent

Not surprisingly, this is a pie in which Lord Stern has several fingers:

http://bellona.org/news/climate-change/international-climate-conferences/2012-12-ngo-report-in-support-of-ccs-launched-by-lord-stern-at-bellona-pavilion-in-doha
"In order to reach the goal of not increasing the global average temperature by 2 degrees – as set by UN Heads of State in Copenhagen in 2009, we need to cut emissions by 8-9 billion tons by 2050, said Stern. “In that scenario, with CCS necessary to ensure 17 percent of those global emissions reductions, we need to build three thousand full scale CCS facilities in the world from today until 2050.”

http://www.globalccsinstitute.com/institute/about-the-institute/international-advisory-panel
"Lord Nicholas Stern is a renowned academic and former World Bank Chief Economist, as Special Adviser to the Chairman on Economic Development and Climate Change."

Even some greens are suspicious of him:

http://www.redd-monitor.org/2012/10/18/a-few-questions-for-nicholas-stern-and-a-book-review/
"In 2009, Nicholas Stern wrote a book titled, “The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity”. Stern’s “Global Deal” consists of three main proposals: carbon trading; avoided deforestation; and carbon capture and storage (among other technical fixes). Given Stern’s register of interests, none of these proposals is surprising. He is a member of the International Advisory Board of IDEAglobal.com (which promotes carbon trading, including REDD) and of Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute (Australia) (which promotes carbon capture and storage)."

"Stern’s other principal proposal of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), too, would entrench high fossil fuel use by extending its ‘waste frontier’ into new territories. This time the idea is to take fossil-origin carbon directly from the smokestacks of coal-fired plants, liquefy it and pump it underground. Requiring several decades just to test, this scheme would wind up using even more pipes and other infrastructure than is now used to get oil out of the ground (Revkin, 2010; see also LaPlaca, 2010)."

May 22, 2014 at 9:40 AM | Registered Commenterdennisa

denissa,
Your post on Stern's conflicts of interest is interesting. Consider Stern in the context of PCC leadership conflicts, of climategate coverup committee leadership conflicts, and the oft repeated pattern worldwide of climate driven failed schemes and insider's enriching themselves with political pals.
The pattern is not encouraging ."Climate change" seems to have a corrupting influence at many levels.

May 22, 2014 at 3:03 PM | Unregistered Commenterhunter

It’s a bit disappointing to read quite a few posts which are dismissive of this process without, apparently, much understanding of the background and technology. The novelty is in the process arrangement which uses a combination of well-proven technologies.
The partners in this venture are major companies – Toshiba, Chicago Bridge & Iron, Exelon – not the sort of outfits to commit to a major effort like this on the basis of a few flashy powerpoint slides. The next stage will be the commissioning of a 25 MWe pilot next year.
Large-scale oxygen generation uses cryogenic Air Separation Units (ASUs). The technology has been around since the early 1900s and is in widespread use across the world for a multitude of industries supplying oxygen and/or nitrogen for a huge variety of processes. Indeed there are not many industries which do not use industrial gases of some type.
Large requirements are produced on site (unless there is a pipeline nearby as in large areas of northern Europe and corners of the UK) using an ASU –or multiple ASUs for really big demands. The units are usually configured to produce liquid as well as gas, both for export to merchant clients and for storage as back-up.
Oxy-fuel has been around for decades. Basically any combustion process can be a candidate with adoption driven by economic and/or process factors. As well as Toshiba, Siemens are working on oxy-fuel turbines as partners in another venture which has a 150 MWe unit running.
Engineering systems for oxygen-compatibility is as old as the industry itself. The use of turbo-compressors to supply pressurised oxygen is routine, as are all the other challenges of material selection, oxygen cleanliness and so forth.
Using CO2 as the working fluid is hardly new either: it has been used in Magnox reactors since the 50s and in AGRs for almost as long.
In case anyone should be wondering, I have no involvement in this venture. I did work for one of the major industrial gas companies back in the 80s. At the time Rodney Allam – who came up with this patented process – was the chief process engineer.

May 22, 2014 at 11:29 PM | Unregistered Commentermikeh

mikeh,
It is not simply the complex oxyfuel. It is the expensive pumping into geological zones- which wil apparently have to be fracked. And fracking is not acceptable to our green over lords, so that should be a veto.
But set that aside, we are still dealing with a very expensive process that is not going to accomplish what it is claimed to be built for: Mitigating climate.
Even if every coal plant in the world is tied in to a CCS system, we will still get cyclones, droughts, floods, snow storms, warm winters, cool summers, in something very close to the frequency we now experience.
Be cause the frequency now is about the same as it was prior to the age of CO2.

May 23, 2014 at 1:21 AM | Unregistered Commenterhunter

hunter,
I was not endorsing CCS which is a complete waste of time, material and energy (except for the special cases where there is a viable market for the CO2 as with one or two projects in N.America linked to enhanced oil recovery).
This new process - the "Allam cycle" - is claimed to offer lower costs and greater efficiencies that current power generation technologies.
It has the additional benefits of facilitating CO2 capture for use or disposal, if that is attractive, and of reduced emissions.
Therefore it looks to be worth pursuing purely on the grounds of its potential for improved performance.
I was also looking to shed a little light on the technologies involved to dispell some evident misapprehensions.

May 23, 2014 at 1:54 PM | Registered Commentermikeh

You have not explained what "emissions" would be reduced, compared to what.

May 23, 2014 at 2:35 PM | Registered Commenterjohanna

mikeh,
Thank you for your thoughtful reply.
I also find the technology you outline to be very interesting. It sounds like Mr. Allam and his team dealt with manyof the concerns I outlined rather well.
I hope the technology is further explored and that Mr. Allam, or his estate, benefit from its success.
But certainly it would be better explored and exploited if industry was encouraged to take the risks to develop it further, rather than keep government's less than capable hands in control.
The madness of climate obsessed policies like CO2 injection in the name of cliamte management is what I was railing against.
If CO2 injection can have an economically rational and safe environmental purpose, I am all for it.

May 24, 2014 at 11:56 AM | Unregistered Commenterhunter

Bishop,

THe issue is not cost versus engineering, it is what is the point of pumping CO2 into the ground at great cost and great energy cost unless its attached to an enhanced oil recovery project?

The real question is therefore why spend money on doing something complicated, which reduces the efficiency of the power station or cement plant or etc. without showing any gain?

May 24, 2014 at 4:19 PM | Unregistered CommenterKeith

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