Houston Venue for Trans-Atlantic Cooperation and Knowledge Exchange in CCS and EOR

All three countries are global leaders in the field of CCS research and development and have dedicated billions of dollars to reducing their CO2 emissions through CCS projects. The aim of the workshop, titled ‘Trans-Atlantic Research to Business: CCS in EOR’, was to enhance trans- Atlantic cooperation within this field of research.

 

The Workshop was a continuation of previous efforts by the British, Norwegian and Canadian Consulates in Texas to put CCS technology on the agenda and enhance cooperation in this area of research and technology. The December 2011 Workshop was the third in the sequence, which began with the workshop ‘North Sea CCS: Comparative Approaches from the UK, Norway and the US’ December 2010, and was followed up by a British, Norwegian and Canadian seminar during this year’s OTC conference in Houston in May.

 

Despite the fact that the UK recently cancelled the Longannet project, it is still committed to CCS deployment through smaller projects and has £1 billion available for CCS projects. EU has invested about a billion Euros in European Energy Programme for Recovery, which the UK is very engaged in. Canada has over $3 billion in funding for CCS spread across federal and provincial governments, and the Norwegian Government is supporting CCS through majority funding in Technology Centre Mongstad (TCM).  

 

 ‘Trans-Atlantic Research to Business: CCS in EOR’ focused on CO2 storage research, capabilities, and opportunities for commercialization in the US, UK, Norway and Canada. The workshop outlined potentials for research and commercial partnerships, and how to move from research to business, focusing on storage assessment and monitoring.

 

A combination of measures will be needed to reduce emissions in the future, among these renewable energy sources, improved end sufficiency and a shift from coal to gas. The speakers at the workshop agreed that fossil fuel will remain an important source of energy and that CCS thus needs to play a larger role to curb emissions in the future. In fact, the International Energy Agency has estimated that up to one fifth of the total reductions by 2050 will be a direct consequence of CCS. Stuart Haszeldine, Professor of Carbon Capture and Storage from the University of Edinburgh, underlined that Britain’s CCS commitment to a large extent is a consequence of domestic political pressure. For other EU countries onshore storage is largely unpopular and has been blocked in Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark.

 

Olav Hansen, Statoil’s Leader-Geophysics, explained Norway’s effort to store CO2 in storages like Slepiner, Snøhvit, Svalbard and Technology Centre Mongstad. Every year since 1996, more than one million tons of CO2 has been captured from the Sleipner gas field and stored in a saline aquifer. Mongstad is the world’s largest facility for testing and improving CO2 capture technologies. Two different CO2 capture techniques from two exhaust gas sources will be tested, while captured CO2 will be released.

 

The main theme throughout the Workshop was how to make CCS profitable and the need for utilization.  Although the technologies for CO2 capture, CO2 Storage and CO2 EOR are in place, the integration of capture, transport, storage and EOR pose challenges. CO2 EOR is not a solution in itself, and needs to be done with other options such as CO2 capture from energy generation, CO2 storage in saline aquifers and fuel switching (gas, electrification and renewables).  

 

To view the presentations of some of the participants, click the following links:

Graue

Haszeldine

Meckel

Verdon

Fernandez