CCS all about the ‘right rocks’ - Part One
A report from the Third Annual Coal Tech conference, held on September 15-16th, on steps to carbon storage in Australia.
The PCC pilot plant is a key tool for low emissions coal research. Image courtesy CSIRO
By Paula Wallace
The Third Annual Coal Tech conference hosted a range of insightful presentations on coal related technologies, including clean coal and carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies; coal-to-liquids; underground coal gasification; and syngas.
James McGregor, energy systems manager, CSIRO Division of Energy Technology, gave a timely update on the organisation’s progress with CCS for coal fired power generation.
And, global specialist in geological storage solutions for carbon dioxide, Schlumberger Carbon Services, shared its expertise on the parameters of capture and storage. The company’s Andrew Garnett drew from its 80 year history in subsurface evaluation in the oil and gas industry, to provide a picture of what development may look like in Australia’s coal fired electricity sector.
CCS is best technology for short to medium term: CSIRO
James McGregor told conference delegates that the CSIRO has settled on post combustion carbon capture as the most likely and best technology for short to medium term deployment.
“If there’s very little demand for new power stations then whatever technology we select invariably has to be retrofittable to existing plants. And this becomes particularly important with the growth of coal use in the developing nations.”
Post combustion carbon capture technology sits on the back end of an existing coal fired power station, taking the flue gas which contains carbon dioxide and putting it through various processes using technology that has been around for nearly 85 years.
McGregor said that the recent ABC Television’s Four Corners program which featured clean coal technologies left the impression that “carbon capture and storage was so far off and so high risk it was never going to happen”.
“I think that’s not the case, I think…the only technological barrier to deployment is the categorisation and location of storage sites, the rest of the barriers to deployment are regulatory or community based issues.”
One of the major drawbacks of most of the carbon capture technologies is that they are a parasitic load on the power station, the currently available technologies consuming around 25 per cent of the power station’s total output.
They are also expensive - current generation technology will probably double the cost of electricity at the generator.
Whilst each of the three components of CCS – capture, transport and storage - have all been demonstrated at commercial scale, they’ve never been demonstrated as an integrated system.
“I think that’s the next big challenge certainly for the coal fired generation sector,” said McGregor.
CSIRO is three years into its five year program for post combustion capture - made up of pilot plant program, fundamental research program looking at next generation and over-the-horizon technologies.
“It ties everything together – economic and integration work. If we don’t get a price point that the industry is going to accept then there’ll never be deployment.”
The key areas of focus in terms of reducing capital costs include the size of the absorber, the amount of heat going into the stripper or regenerator and the electrical efficiency of the solvent that is used.
“…we are getting very close to approaching the solvent and understanding the chemistry, that we can reduce costs by about half, just by getting a novel solvent,” said McGregor.
The CSIRO has three pilot scale plants in Australia, two of which are operational, and a further plant located in Beijing, China.
The purpose of the pilot plants is to provide information for engineers to scale up and design these technologies.
“The process we’re adapting has very little information or details on the impact of using flue gas from coal fired power stations. Some of the parameters we look for are sort of things that process engineers and chemical engineers actually need to design these plants.”
One plant is focussed on solvent chemistry, another on ammonia based process and the third plant will focus on next generation process improvements.
“Using post production and capture with an integrated research program along the way, we can actually make significant cost reductions to the plant but also not make the generators invest in multi billion dollar decisions tomorrow,” said McGregor.
To read the final part of this report visit:
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