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LONDON – When countries meet on Sunday to determine how they will commit to reducing carbon emissions, a Norwegian-led oil consortium will offer a solution: pump some of your excess carbon dioxide and we could stock it up for you.
Environmentalists fear that expensive technology, known as carbon capture and storage, will perpetuate the status quo of fossil fuels when deep and rapid reductions in energy consumption are needed to limit global warming.
But CCS supporters will lobby at the two-week climate conference in Katowice, Poland, for significant investment and regulatory changes needed to scale up, citing US assessments that may play a role .
"Katowice is expected to be important," said Stephen Bull, vice president of the state-owned Norwegian oil company, Equinor, which is involved in developing a CSC project. called Northern Lights.
"The CSC is the only solution," he said, saying countries needed the technology to deliver on their promises when the 2015 climate change agreement was reached in Paris.
A UN report warned on Tuesday that countries should triple their current efforts to contain the rise in global temperature within the limits predicted by scientists, in order to avoid devastating floods, storms and drought.
With the United States, Norway is one of the leading countries in the carbon capture and storage strategy, which has been working for 20 years to divert carbon dioxide from its vast production of carbon dioxide. gas and use it to extract hard-to-reach oil from aging fields.
Oslo plans to launch the first viable project using CCS to limit industrial emissions by capturing carbon dioxide from domestic and foreign industrial facilities and storing it permanently in empty oil tanks under the seabed.
The relatively small scale of the project, as well as the unresolved problem of whoever will pay to finance it, highlight the obstacles to the implementation of CCS technology.
Necessarily bad?
The organizers of the € 1.6 billion ($ 1.8 billion) Northern Lights project could store about 5 million tonnes a year of emissions from a Norwegian waste recovery plant. A cement plant, as well as emissions from other countries.
This is a tiny fraction of the 6 billion tons per year that will have to be stored by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency, which coordinates the energy policies of industrialized countries.
The project still needs the Norwegian government to make a final investment decision, which, according to Trude Sundset, CEO of Gasnova, the Norwegian CO2 capture and storage company, was planned for 2020 or 2021 .
This will depend on the progress of the project, she said, adding that it was also necessary to involve the industry and other countries.
"It is not easy to find a good business model in the short and medium term," she said. "It's naïve to think that a country can pay; it must be a collaboration between industry and government. "
A European Union climate strategy released on Wednesday indicates that the rapid deployment of renewable energy means that the potential of CCS as a major option for decarbonisation seems lower than ever before. But he added that the CSC would be needed, especially if the bloc wanted to reach the goal of zero net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
"There is no doubt that we need to improve carbon capture and storage and invest," said EU climate chief Miguel Arias Canete.
Previous attempts to fund CCS in Europe have largely failed.
An EU program in 2012 failed to fund a single CSC project and a UK aid program was canceled in 2015.
The UK government is now planning to help develop the country's first commercial project that will capture the carbon dioxide that will be used in industrial applications by the mid-2020s.
The European Green Party gives priority to energy efficiency, recycling, tree planting and renewable energy, but believes that CSC could play a role in offsetting emissions from processes such as 'steel.
"We have to experiment with it. There is an industrial application – think steel, "said Bas Eickhout, Green deputy from the Netherlands and spokesman for the Greens for the climate. "The problem is that the longer we wait, the more it becomes a necessary evil (CCS)."
Coal debate
According to the Global CCS Institute, 18 large CCS plants are in operation around the world, according to which 2,500 CCS plants, each capable of storing 1.5 million tonnes per year, will be needed by 2040 to keep global warming at bay. a rise of 2 ° C.
Countries as far afield as Algeria and Japan are working with CCS, but only two of CCS's global operations are on power plants. The CSC industry sees potential for a lot more.
While Europe is focusing on renewable energy sources and replacing coal with greenhouse gas emissions, developing countries say they can not act as quickly and US President Donald Trump , who has withdrawn his country from the Paris agreement on climate change, promotes coal.
But the think tank of the American Institute for Economics and Energy Analysis (IEEFA) said this month that coal plants are struggling to compete with wind and solar resources, whose price has quickly dropped even without CCS.
"The economy is a serious problem. And to do large-scale CCS, you need to build a whole new infrastructure – new pipelines, finding repositories that would work, inspection equipment, and then monitoring, "said David Schlissel of IEEFA.
IEFAFA estimates that installing a CHC in an average coal-fired plant would cost close to $ 100 per megawatt hour (MWh). This compares with the average prices forecast for power, wind and solar contracts between $ 20 and $ 40 / MWh or less since 2017.
The CCS Institute, which represents companies involved in the development of technology, announced Wednesday a feasibility study on the installation of CSS at a second coal-fired plant in Saskatchewan, Canada, which showed that this solution can be realized at lower cost.
He cites a capture cost of $ 45 per tonne of CO2, stating that the study shows that coal can be competitive with natural gas.
Large mining companies also rely on CCS.
BHP, the world's largest publicly traded coking coal producer and the world's largest producer of steel products, has set itself the goal of bringing its activity back to zero in the second half of the century, in line with the Paris Agreement. climate changes.
BHP has divested many highly polluting activities to another company, South 32, but the indirect emissions from the products sold remain very significant because of the use of its iron ore and its coking coal for the manufacture of the # 39; steel.
He also said that he hoped to increase his oil production.
"If you're not serious about the CSC, you're not going to reach 2 ° C (warming up), let alone 1.5," said Fiona Wild, Vice President, Climate Change and Sustainability at BHP, referring to the UN boundaries. are needed to prevent a dramatic increase in heat waves, floods and droughts.
BHP donated money to CCS research in China, but said the technology required investment and regulatory support from countries around the world, including a global rather than a local carbon tax , which is still far away.
Poland, which relies heavily on coal, mainly mined in Silesia, where the December climate talks will take place, has argued in favor of the CSC, but now insists on the role of its forests, calling for them to be considered as sinks. carbon.
Professor Stuart Haszeldine from the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh recognizes the role of trees, while arguing that CCS is the only way to reach the US goal of zero net emissions by mid-century.
"Trees can mop up CO2 – but a tree consumes 2 kg of CO2 each year. Each of us would need three football fields at Wembley Stadium to absorb our emissions, "he said.
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