A global challenge Demand for energy is expected to increase by 40-50% over coming decades, driven primarily by population growth and increasing prosperity. A rising population creates a greater need for lighting, heating, transport, industrial production, and so forth. Around 1.5 billion people currently live without electricity. Their expectations of growing prosperity are legitimate. All serious forecasts show that coal, oil, and gas will be the most important energy carriers for several decades to come. Even in the “twodegree” scenario from the International Energy Agency (IEA), the consumption of oil and gas is estimated to increase. Emissions are an undesirable, but unavoidable consequence of the growth in energy consumption. The fundamental dilemma facing all of us is therefore how to supply the world with sufficient energy, while simultaneously reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A wide range of mitigation efforts are required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions: energy efficiency, carbon capture and storage (CCS), fuel switching (e.g. coal to natural gas), nuclear power, renewable energy, etc. Knowing that the world will be dependant on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future, there is a need to develop technology to reduce emissions from the use of these fuels. I cannot see how CO2 emissions can be reduced in the medium to long term without a major deployment of CCS. This is supported by many key analyses, including the IEA’s World Energy Outlook.
Industrial scale CCS CCS is a climate mitigation tool that captures carbon dioxide (CO2) and stores it in deep geological formations, away from the atmosphere. CCS is already being used on an industrial scale, and Statoil is currently involved in three large CCS projects: Sleipner and Snøhvit (both off the coast of Norway) and In Salah (in Algeria). All of these are projects where CO2 is removed from the wellstream at high pressure in a closed system, as distinct from the capture of CO2 from the flue gases which are produced, for example, during the process of burning fossil fuels in power generation. Although there are great expectations about full scale CCS, and a lot of good technology development is taking place, it is important to be aware that, so far, no large CO2 capture from flue gases has been realized. The costs of developing huge CO2-capture plants are currently too high, and further technology development is needed in order to make CCS a really significant way to reduce carbon emissions.
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On the political level, the attention being paid to CCS is growing. The European Union’s new climate package includes a CO2-storage directive, as well as a revision of the EU emission trading system to provide financial incentives for CCS. CO2-reduction efforts in the United States, Canada, Norway, the UK, and Australia, also include substantial support schemes for CCS in this introductory phase. In order to make CCS a part of the response to climate challenge, I see four main challenges: G The costs of capture technology, which are currently way higher than CO2 emission costs. G The absence of a firm legal basis. G A lack of public awareness. G Some unsolved issues related to CCS infrastructure.
A price on CO2 emissions Mankind has been emitting CO2 into the atmosphere for centuries. So far, most emissions do not have a cost attached to them. Before CCS can realize its potential as a mitigation tool, industry must be convinced that the longterm cost of emitting CO2 into the atmosphere
will be as high as, or higher, than the cost of CCS; i.e. CCS has to become commerciallyviable in its own right. One important element here is the capital cost and energy use associated with CO2-capture, which have to be reduced. (The high cost of post-combustion capture is related to the need to first collect and store huge volumes of flue gas, and then to heat it in order to release and capture the CO2.) One of the most important factors holding back the deployment of CCS – and indeed all climate mitigation efforts – is therefore the lack of a world-wide, sufficiently high, and predictable, CO2-price. The lack of such a price (as well as the absence of a global mechanism whereby the CO2 emissions that are stored are not counted as “emitted”) means the pace of large-scale global deployment of CCS is being slowed down. Financial and technical support is needed to make CCS affordable and transferable, particularly to developing countries where energy demand is growing so rapidly. The CCS project at In Salah in Algeria is a very interesting example as it is located in a developing country without a greenhouse gas limitation