World’s First Carbon Capture Plant to Begin Operations

The world’s first retrofit of a power plant with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology will begin operating this month in the south of France. By Alok Jha of the Guardian.

At a power plant at Lacq, energy company Total has upgraded an existing gas-fired boiler with CCS technology – a crucial step towards reducing carbon emissions from fossil-fuel power plants worldwide.

With renewable energy sources a long way from covering the world’s increasing demand for energy, many experts believe that developing reliable technology to allow countries to burn fossil fuels without releasing dangerous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere is essential to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

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Experts welcomed Total’s achievement but added that it highlighted how Britain was being left behind in the development of an important technology to head off climate change.

“CCS remains the most important initiative that needs to be implemented both here and around the world in reducing emissions from coal, gas and oil-fired power stations,” said Environment Agency chairman Chris Smith.

“[But this project] re-emphasises the importance of making sure that Britain takes an early opportunity to put itself in the lead worldwide in taking the technology forward.”

Stuart Haszeldine, professor of geology and an expert in CCS at the University of Edinburgh, was more scathing. “The UK has been first to stoke up interest in CCS, in the 1990s. But since then, CCS has not received any significant government support to make any real projects happen.”

He said the technology was essential for the UK to meet its climate change targets. “We have to completely clean up CO2 emissions from gas as well as coal by 2030, if the UK is to meet the legally binding decreases set by the climate change committee,” said Haszeldine. “Projects like Lacq will help to make cleanup cheaper and bring that reality closer.”

The 60m euro Lacq project will transport and store 60,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide every year in the nearby depleted gas field at Rousse – once the biggest onshore natural gas field in Europe, but which is now almost empty. It is the first to link together all parts of the carbon capture chain from burning natural gas to isolating CO2 from flue gases and burying it underground.

Reusing an existing pipeline that has been transporting natural gas from Rousse to Lacq for 50 years, Total engineers plan to push the carbon dioxide from the power plant in the other direction, injecting the gas into the Rousse reservoir at a depth of around 4,500m. The Lacq project will run for two years, after which engineers will monitor the Rousse gas field to demonstrate that the carbon dioxide remains safely trapped inside.

Last year, the Schwarze Pumpe power station in north Germany became the first demonstration experiment to build a a 12MW fossil fuel-fired boiler from scratch with full CCS – it will bury 100,000 tonnes of CO2 a year 3,000m below the surface of the depleted Altmark gas field.

CCS is seen as the technolology that could save the planet from the expected increased use of coal in power stations around the world. At its best, it could trap up to 90% of a power plant’s carbon emissions and, though each element of the capture, transportation and storage process is already proven and in use, only the Schwarze Pumpe plant has put the chain together until now.

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