Welcome to the Hydrophiles, the HR Wallingford podcast. I'm Sally Jackson, and today I'm joined by Mike Case to finish off our series on the future of energy. Mike's an expert in clean energy, and he looks at the technology and the markets in that area. And previously, we've talked about subjects such as filling up the Sahara with solar panels, industrializing floating wind and the future of nuclear. And today, to finish our series, we're going to be talking about carbon capture and storage.
Hi Mike
Hi Sally
So carbon capture and storage, we've heard a lot about it in the news. We hear a lot about it around the COP conferences, people talking about whether it's a solution, but actually it's not a very well understood process. So could you just outline what it is for us please?
It kind of does what it says on the tin really. It's sometimes called CCS or CCUS, which is carbon capture, utilization and storage, and that's where you use the carbon dioxide you capture for another process inbetween that and storage like making gypsum or something like that. So generally, it's about capturing carbon from intensive industry, or from energy power production.
Say, from a gas power plant, you'd capture the carbon dioxide coming off the stack, and then you'd either liquefy that or process it in some way, and then store it underground. So the idea is, you store it in depleted gas wells offshore. So in the case of the UK, that would be off the northwest in Liverpool Bay Area and Liverpool Bay gas field, Morecambe Bay gas field, or off the North Sea, the North Sea oil and gas fields.
So just to be clear, these are gas fields that are under the sea and are now essentially empty, Yeah, and so basically the idea is you refill them with carbon dioxide that you've captured from other processes.
So that's how it interacts with water and water processes.
Yeah so the interaction for us and the work we've done so for a number of different projects, and the inquiries we're seeing coming through is about the transportation, interestingly. So where the CO2 is created, or where you have the problem, isn't necessarily near where you can store the gas. So one of the projects we worked on was a gas power project down in South Wales, and we looked at how the carbon was going to be captured, and then how it was going to be processed and then transported.
So there's a number of places at the moment which have kind of opened up for injecting, re-injecting back into old gas fields. So you've got a high net project, which is on the Dee Estuary in the northwest, you've got Viking Project, which is over on the Humber. And then in Norway, you've got the Northern Lights Project. So they're all taking gas in, if you like, or re-injecting gas back into these gas fields.
So you talked about liquefying the carbon dioxide that obviously needs transporting to the site where it's going to be injected. What fuel is similar, what challenges does it present to be transporting liquefied carbon dioxide? What do we know about that?
So I guess there's a lot of similarity between transporting, you know, any liquid gasses. So in this case, carbon dioxide is liquid under when it's pressurized. So typically, the medium pressures we're looking at for the projects we've looked at so far are between minus 20, minus 30 degrees C and it's pressurized, so there's only certain number of vessels, actually specialist vessels, that can take it, and they're actually quite small
compared to LNG vessels. We're typically looking at the vessel size for CO2 is around 7,500 meters cubed, whereas for LNG, you're looking at between 125 to up to 267,000 meters cubed. So more than 20 times the size.
So what does that mean in terms of logistics? Does it limit where you can get to for your sites? Or do you just need more boats or vessels? Or how does that work?
The problem with carbon capture and storage is you've got limited sites where you can inject, re-inject the gas into the gas wells. And the places where you're producing the carbon dioxide are not necessarily near those sites. So you can't necessarily pipe directly from where you are to the site of injection, the point of injection. And if that's the case, then you've got to liquefy
and transport the gas. So that's where we come in - looking at how the logistics of that, really, of how you get the gas from the from the point of production to the point of injection. And you know, in terms of shipping, that's what we're looking at. So shipping large quantities of CO2 around the country, or even internationally, because you can see how an international market might develop for moving this stuff around to places which
have got capacity. So you might have a hard to abate sector in one country, they want to store their CO2 somewhere, and they've got nowhere within country where they can do that. So they'll transport that to somewhere like Norway, or somewhere like the UK, where we can re-inject it into our existing wells. So it's looking at the that logistics piece of the number of ships you might need a process, say, we had a gas fired power plant.
It's going to be continually, or not necessarily continually, but you'll have periods where it will be continually producing gas and how much storage you need, how many ships you need, what the kind of the turnaround time is for each of the ships. So it's looking at the logistics, but then also looking at the engineering of the jetties to take the ships and so on, and also the maneuvering of the of the ships around the port, around the jetties.
That actually brings me quite neatly on to what I was going to ask you, which is, how much are ports going to need to adapt to to transport carbon dioxide, rather than say, you know, LPG, or whatever it is they're doing at the moment At the moment, it's a very small market, but it's growing. So the truth is, we don't really know, but we can see it's probably more likely to involve special jetties close to where the where the production is going to be.
So for the production of the CO2 you might have a facility which captures and liquefies the gas, and then you'll have a pipeline to a jetty, a specialized jetty, which take the gas onto ship and take it away. So I think it depends. You might not see it at the larger ports, but it depends where the power stations are, or where the factories are that are producing the carbon dioxide.
And this is all very hypothetical, isn't it? It's a long way away before we're going to see this. And it does, if I'm honest, listening to you sound expensive.
It is expensive. And, well, it is actually already happening. So we've already seen some projects which are being developed now. It will be quite expensive. I mean, it's like anything as the market grows, and it largely depends on the carbon tax, I suppose, if you like, the cost of carbon. So as that increases, the cost of producing carbon for these hard to abate sectors becomes more cost effective to capture the carbon and transport it and store it.
So it's the sort of thing we should be looking out for in the sort of next round of COP negotiations. It sounds like one to keep an eye on, as all these issues that we've been talking about in our energy futures podcasts have been. So Mike, thanks so much for explaining what's on the horizon for energy. Really appreciated, and maybe in a couple of years, we'll come back and revisit these topics and see where we moved on to.
Thanks very much, Sally
Thank you.