Carbon Capture and Middle Ground Storage
Oh my. What a world.
There’s just so much noise, so much distraction – commonly delivered in a tone that resembles standing on opposite sides of the street and screaming at each other. It turns decisions that could be simple into amorphous enigmatic conundrums.
A trivial example for me recently has been deciding what to write about. I’ve started several pieces these last few weeks, become distracted and started another, and then another. They’re all on worthy subjects and they’re likely to get finished eventually, but they felt... wrong. I try to stay focused on being positive and balanced, but I was sounding hoarse. Perhaps I was also screaming.
In this context, I was grateful to read Bryan Cox’s A → B → C post on LinkedIn last week:
“When I think about solving for big things, I always visualize the progression above, with “A” being the current state, “B” being where the partnerships, open-mindedness, and hard work occur, and “C” being the outcome that emerges from the solution space empowered by “B”.
However, when I think about the public dialogue and solution space as it exists right now, I see a progression that looks like A-->C, with the “C” outcome looking very different depending on one’s perspective or ideology. Some want “C” to look exactly like “A” while others want radical change, and no one is engaging in the “B” space to find common ground and shared values. I believe this A-->C progression is one of the contributing factors to the polarization and division we are seeing – people are talking at each other rather than working with each other, because they don’t see themselves represented in other people’s versions of “C”.
Our opportunity as leaders is to blaze a path to where we can rally around “B”, to get to a place where “C” outcomes are shared outcomes that we can all see ourselves in. “B” is where multiple pathways live. “B” is where open minds and open hearts live. “B” is where shared values live. “B” is where the energy transition lives. “B” is where “yes, and” lives.”
My problem wasn’t the content. It was the tone.
Bryan is dead right. Psychologically, we’re never going to get beyond our collective confirmation bias if we move straight to positional advocacy. The gnarly thing about confirmation bias is how it strengthens with intelligence – and there are plenty of smarter folk than me contemplating energy issues.
One of the subjects I was researching was carbon capture and storage (thanks to Ralph Cowan & Pedram Fanailoo for directing me to some good resources). I had been trying to approach this with the intention of looking for the good, but found myself struggling to check my critical instinct.
You see, it’s not a subject I had engaged with in any significant detail before. It somewhat made intuitive sense – inject stuff you don’t want to emit underground – but all of the attempts I knew about had struggled. CO2 is, after all, a heavy (therefore expensive to compress) and corrosive beast, and projects like Gorgon had experienced some pretty high-profile challenges.
In fact, the concept always brought to my mind part of a favourite Hoover quote of mine:
“The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them. His acts, step by step, are in hard substance. He cannot bury his mistakes in the grave like the doctors. He cannot argue them into thin air or blame the judge like the lawyers. He cannot, like the architects, cover his failures with trees and vines. He cannot, like the politicians, screen his shortcomings by blaming his opponents and hope that the people will forget. The engineer simply cannot deny that he did it. If his works do not work, he is damned.“
A few weeks ago, I may have characterised CCS as burying mistakes. Now, I’m not so sure.
Maybe you’re an expert in this, and if so, please keep me honest. Maybe you’re in the same position as me as having been aware conceptually, but haven’t had yet the chance to look at it critically or technically.
Here’s what I’ve learned, and I’m looking for the ‘B’.
The challenge is above ground
There are lots of places to put it – albeit some reservoirs are better understood than others – so this part, whilst indeed a question of proximity, is eminently solvable. Getting a sufficiently pure and dry CO2 stream to make the compression efficient appears to be the biggest constraint. This is why we see CCS for reservoir CO2, but not combustion CO2.
Here’s an indicator: To the best of my knowledge, there is not a single combined cycle gas turbine generator in service with CCS. I would have expected this, the workhorse of the gas-fired generation world, to be an obvious target. There are some folks claiming a technology advantage in capturing CO2 from turbine exhaust streams, but it’s hard to find technical details to be able to verify this – anyone who genuinely does has huge potential in front of them, especially if it’s suitable for a retrofit.
The costs are eye watering
The IEA estimate that CCS has to do 15% of the 2050 net-zero heavy lifting – at a capital cost of $1.3T, total cost of $9.7T. You may not agree with the IEA on this – I certainly don’t – but they have no reason to overstate the cost.
Many people glaze over when we get to number of this scale. A trillion - 1,000,000,000,000 - is a million million, or a thousand billion. Put a dollar sign in front of it, and it’s an insane amount of money that could do a lot of good in a lot of different ways.
Let’s find some reference points. $1.3T is the size of the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund (built on the back of oil & gas revenues) – those amongst us with a proclivity for equity may like the idea of that being spent on something like CCS – and $9.7T is about half of US 2020 GDP. Oof.
Technology development swings a bigger axe than subsidies
There is some cool innovation happening to reengineer processes to produce higher purity CO2 streams. One in particular is pretty exciting…
You’ve possibly never heard of the Allam-Fetvedt cycle, a power generation cycle that burns (for example) methane in a pure oxygen + supercritical CO2 stream, naturally resulting in a pure CO2 stream that can be captured. There’s a pilot plant operating in Texas with plans for commercial scale facilities in Colorado and Illinois. The claim is that it can produce power at a 22% cost premium to conventional CCGT which, given the alternatives on the table, is essentially free. It can also be used with coal, making it Joe Manchin-approvable.
I’ve had some fun geeking out on the thermodynamics of this (once a chemical engineer, always a chemical engineer…), and from what I can find, I think it’s credible. I won’t bore y’all with this part, but for those of you who are so inclined, I’ve footnoted1 some thoughts and observations.
The B
We talk a lot about the need for innovation. But do we really enable it?
Sure, government programmes generally provide tax breaks for R&D, but then they move to direct support for certain qualifying projects. My general preference is for the government to get out of the way and let the market sort things out, but I can understand this approach… sometimes.
Take the example of the Allam-Fetvedt design. I’ve outlined my ham-fisted engineer’s view of the obvious challenges – are these best addressed by one company attempting to solve them, or by many operators, metallurgists, process designers and heat exchanger manufacturers?
What if, instead, governments bought up the patents and IP, and made it open source? That would open the door for many more minds to consider the challenges, many more facilities to move forward, many more lessons learned. The developers would be paid fairly for their innovation (noting that we’d need some lawyers to come to this ‘B’ and figure out how this could work cost effectively, perhaps with some creative licensing arrangements) and would, I’m willing to bet, continue to invest in innovation.
It’s not so far removed from the calls to waive covid vaccine patents – the critical difference here is that I’m suggesting that the patents are bought, and that buying patents like these is a better way to spend government funds in this area than direct project support.
The same model could apply to the exhaust stack solution – bring the technology advantages into the daylight, and let the market pick the winners.
This model has the potential to accelerate the rate of progress, bringing us closer to another part of Hoover’s view:
“It is a great profession. There is the fascination of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings jobs and homes to men. Then it elevates the standards of living and adds to the comforts of life. That is the engineer’s high privilege.”
Ah, jobs - the subject of another post I started…
AB
Andrew’s thoughts on Allam-Fetvedt
- At the kinds of pressures and temperatures needed for this process, the partial pressure of the relatively small amount of combustion water is probably enough to make corrosion a concern – and a leak of supercritical CO2 is likely pretty ugly. I’m guessing that there’s some exotic metallurgy involved.
- Heat integration with the air separation process (to produce pure oxygen for use in the powergen cycle) adds complexity, and potentially unreliability – Air separation is not my specialist subject, but I’d be surprised if it’s typically as high reliability as power generation. Integrating a continuous process (powergen) with one that has cyclical elements (air drying prior to separation) introduces some sources of instability.
- Also related to the heat integration – I expect that this means that the process is happy when it’s stable, making it more suitable for baseload generation rather than peak shaving.