Carbon Capture & Storage Technologies

 

The goal of the study was to determine what technologies exist to capture carbon dioxide and at what price. A further goal was to determine what technologies were emerging that could compete with the existing technologies or displace them. An objective of the study was to determine what the costs would be to the purchases of carbon capture equipment and also what the impact would be on the consumer. Another objective was to determine which companies owned the technologies to capture carbon dioxide and to determine how they were positioning their technology to compete against other technologies and if they were acquiring new technologies from startup companies. 

  

 

With global warming receiving unprecedented coverage in the popular media, and being recognized as a significant global problem requiring the participation of most of the world’s governments and peoples to find a solution, this study seeks to define exactly what is being done by whom with what expected results, at what cost and what can be expected over the next 5 years. It also discusses whether certain trends that are starting now can be expected to continue. 

 

 

The intended audience is those people who have an interest in reducing their corporate carbon dioxide emissions and companies that may wish to invest in, license, install, or acquire promising carbon dioxide capture technologies. The report, as an impartial presentation of the best available technologies to reduce CO₂ emissions from power plants, this report, should also be of interest to state utility regulators who must make decisions that affect billion dollar investments by corporations as well as the future cost of electricity for the rate payers. 

 

This report should also be of interest to subcontractors in the electric power construction industry, pipe manufacturers, and pipe fitters, as new electric power projects that capture carbon dioxide will need to pipe it from the site to a storage facility.

 

 

The report examines global markets for carbon dioxide capture and storage technology, the status of the competing carbon capture technologies as well as global technological research and developments for carbon capture technologies to prevent global warming. It also covers technologies able to capture carbon dioxide from stationary sources at the point of emission. This report does not cover technologies that are used to capture other global warming gases such as methane. 

 

 

The initial task was to determine the technologies most suited to capture carbon dioxide for electric power applications and determine the cost of those technologies based on the cost per megawatt (MW) of capacity. The second step was to determine which companies were providing the technologies and which companies were buying and why. The third step was to compile a list of the projects for each of the three key technologies including the location, the project owner, the expected cost of the project, the size of the project in megawatts, how much carbon dioxide the project intends to capture per year, and the provider of the carbon capture technologies. Those projects expected to start in the 2007 to 2012 time frame form the basis for the forecast of growth for the carbon capture technologies examined in this report. 

 

As well as counting the number of new projects, another step involved was counting existing projects employing the same technologies to determine historic and current values for these technologies. These technologies have found widespread use in other industries and applications not related to the electric utility and not always related to capturing carbon dioxide. The world’s oxygen market is discussed briefly to show the place of oxy-combustion activity in other applications

 

The study needed to determine how much carbon dioxide needs to be captured in billions of metric tons (MT) each year in order to bring world carbon dioxide emissions back to the levels produced in 1990. The Kyoto treaty calls for reductions of carbon dioxide below the levels of 1990, and more stringent goals are expected to be negotiated in the next 2 years, but 1990 was chosen as a baseline for estimates in this report. 

 

Another step was to determine how much carbon dioxide in millions of metric tons is being captured for the world merchant gas market, how much carbon dioxide is being consumed in the manufacture of other chemicals and products, and how much is being consumed by a tertiary method of oil recovery known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR). This step included identifying the sources of carbon dioxide used in these applications by company, and included estimates of production for the U.S. and the rest of the world.

 

A thorough search of THOMAS.gov and other reliable sources was made to determine the many bills pending before Congress that will affect the regulation of CO₂. A search for state records was also made to find U.S. state legislation now in effect governing the emission of CO₂. Regulation of CO₂ on the international and national level is the driving force in CO₂ capture and those regulations were surveyed as well. 

 

U.S. patents were examined, and more than 100 research projects taking place in the U.S., Europe, Canada, and Australia also were examined to determine what new technologies were emerging that offer cheaper CO₂ capture. All of these sources were viewed together to determine the overall value of carbon dioxide capture over the next 5 years. 

 

 

Sources of information include United Nation, U.S., European, Canadian, Chinese, Japanese, Australian, Brazilian, and Indian government reports, studies, research abstracts and status reports, press releases, conference presentations, and telephone and E-mail communication. Corporate information includes annual reports, quarterly reports, press releases, information from corporate websites, corporate presentations to analysts, conference presentations, and published speeches by corporate executives as well as telephone and E-mail communications. This report also includes information from television reports and the print media. Most information was published between January 2005 and 2007-12-15. 

  

 

Alton Parrish has been an editor of Battery and EV News and Fuel Cell Technology News and has contributed to other BCC newsletters. He has authored BCC Research reports that covered hydrogen generation for fuel cells, commercial amino acids, electric vehicles, fuel cell technology, holography, portable battery-powered products, and portable power devices.