Groningen: Carbon capture – public biggest obstacle
Feature Articles, Sep  01  2009 (Digital Energy Journal)

- The public is still one of the biggest obstacles to carbon capture and storage (CCS), with people not wanting carbon dioxide to be stored under their houses, said Philippe Lacour-Gayet, senior scientific advisor to the Chairman of Schlumberger, speaking at a June 27th conference to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Groningen gas field.

Discussions around CCS first started in the mid 1990s when people decided that capturing and storing carbon would be a good idea – but then started hitting obstacles, particularly that it would be hard to convince anyone to agree to carbon being stored near their homes.

Instead of “not in my back yard” the expression should be “not under my back yard, or NUMBY,” he said. “NUMBY is one of the biggest obstacles to overcome.”

Like with many fields, there is a mismatch between the public and subject experts on how dangerous carbon capture is. “Experts and the public see risk very differently,” he said. “Expert studies can’t convince the public that a project is safe.”

“CCS is safe, reliable and there’s a good chance we can do it at a reasonable cost,” he said. “CCS is technically doable.”

“There are different mechanisms for trapping CO2, including structural trapping, solution in water and solution in minerals. In most places there’s enough pore space – only India and Japan may not have enough pore space.”

“Most of the cost is in the carbon separation – but it might come down,” he said. “Capture costs can be $20 to $60 per ton of CO2, whilst transport is about $5.” The problem is that most of the costs of capture have to be made upfront.

In order for the increase in electricity prices due to carbon capture to be under 10 per cent, the maximum the public is thought to be willing to accept, the total cost of CCS needs to be under $10 per ton of C02, he said, so there is a long way to go. “CCS will fly only if the cost is reasonable.”

There is broad support for carbon capture. “Even Greenpeace supports CCS if the carbon comes from biomass – so there’s negative carbon from the atmosphere – which we might have to do,” he said. “The G8 has supported CCS at every meeting since 2003.

President Obama supports CCS. The EU and Australia are putting a lot of money into CCS, he said. The Prime Minister of Norway did a conference on climate change and CCS and he attended a full day.

“Politicians have come to like the idea of burying carbon,” he said. “It’s easy to be cynical about political speeches – but they have backed their words with deeds.”

“The financial crisis has a big effect – people see CCS as a way to create jobs.”

Another problem is getting carbon capture operations up to the necessary scale. There will need to be about 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide captured and stored annually, if CCS is going to contribute 19 per cent of the total required emission reductions by 2050 according to government plans, he said.

Coincidentally, this is a similar figure to the amount of water pumped into oil wells every year – 10 billion tons. But oil and gas companies have a big financial incentive to do this.

Meanwhile the largest proposed demonstration projects are capturing and storing just 1m tonnes / year CO2, he said, so we will need the equivalent of 10,000 demonstration plants.

Mapping the Southern Permian

Hans Doornenbal, project manager for the European Black Shale Database, talked about an geological atlas he has been putting together of the South Permian Basin, a rectangular area of Western Europe including many oilfields, which extends approximately from middle England (West) to Russian border with Poland (East) to Copenhagen (North) to Slovakian border with the Czech Republic (south).

About 150 people have been involved in putting the atlas together, including 146 authors, 25 mappers and 35 reviewers, many seconded from national geological survey organisations, particularly from the UK, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and Poland.

It follows a similar “Millennium Atlas” project 11 years ago – to map the North Sea.

The study looked at 150 years worth of data, carefully integrated together, including 2D and 3D seismic data and well log data.

The atlas will be available on A2 bound paper, on CD-ROM and as a GIS database so it can be incorporated into other software. It has 140 maps altogether.

The atlas will be finally released at the end of 2009.

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