New era for fossil fuels as first carbon capturing power plant begins work

French power station leading the way in the world's sluggish move towards using environmentally vital CCS technology

Alok Jha
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 8 April 2009 17.28 BST

The world's first retrofit of a power plant with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology will begin operating this month in the south of France.
At a power plant at Lacq, energy company Total has upgraded an existing gas-fired boiler with CCS technology – a crucial step towards reducing carbon emissions from fossil-fuel power plants worldwide.
With renewable energy sources a long way from covering the world's increasing demand for energy, many experts believe that developing reliable technology to allow countries to burn fossil fuels without releasing dangerous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere is essential to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
Experts welcomed Total's achievement but added that it highlighted how Britain was being left behind in the development of an important technology to head off climate change.
"CCS remains the most important initiative that needs to be implemented both here and around the world in reducing emissions from coal, gas and oil-fired power stations," said Environment Agency chairman Chris Smith.
"[But this project] re-emphasises the importance of making sure that Britain takes an early opportunity to put itself in the lead worldwide in taking the technology forward."
Stuart Haszeldine, professor of geology and an expert in CCS at the University of Edinburgh, was more scathing. "The UK has been first to stoke up interest in CCS, in the 1990s. But since then, CCS has not received any significant government support to make any real projects happen."
He said the technology was essential for the UK to meet its climate change targets. "We have to completely clean up CO2 emissions from gas as well as coal by 2030, if the UK is to meet the legally binding decreases set by the climate change committee," said Haszeldine. "Projects like Lacq will help to make cleanup cheaper and bring that reality closer."
The 60m euro Lacq project will transport and store 60,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide every year in the nearby depleted gas field at Rousse – once the biggest onshore natural gas field in Europe, but which is now almost empty. It is the first to link together all parts of the carbon capture chain from burning natural gas to isolating CO2 from flue gases and burying it underground.
Reusing an existing pipeline that has been transporting natural gas from Rousse to Lacq for 50 years, Total engineers plan to push the carbon dioxide from the power plant in the other direction, injecting the gas into the Rousse reservoir at a depth of around 4,500m. The Lacq project will run for two years, after which engineers will monitor the Rousse gas field to demonstrate that the carbon dioxide remains safely trapped inside.
Last year, the Schwarze Pumpe power station in north Germany became the first demonstration experiment to build a a 12MW fossil fuel-fired boiler from scratch with full CCS – it will bury 100,000 tonnes of CO2 a year 3,000m below the surface of the depleted Altmark gas field.
CCS is seen as the technolology that could save the planet from the expected increased use of coal in power stations around the world. At its best, it could trap up to 90% of a power plant's carbon emissions and, though each element of the capture, transportation and storage process is already proven and in use, only the Schwarze Pumpe plant has put the chain together until now.
Despite agreement from almost all sides that CCS must be made commercial if the world can ever hope to meet its carbon-reduction targets, a full-scale system remains years away, largely because of the costs involved in its development. As a result, many leading power companies have been reluctant to fund CCS individually, arguing that governments should also shoulder some of the financial risks.
The UK government wants to fund a single demonstration plant using post-combustion capture technology and is running a competition to decide which new power station will get the go-ahead. Within the next few weeks, ministers are expected to announce proposals on how to fund further CCS projects in the UK beyond the competition.
But the British government's procrastination has forced many CCS projects planned in the past decade to be abandoned or moved abroad. These include BP's plans to build a carbon capture plant at Peterhead and Centrica's Eston Grange project.
Haszledine also criticised the lack of research effort in the UK, saying just over £6m has been spent on CCS research in the UK in the past decade compared with $2bn to date in Canada, and annual spends of around £40m in Norway and several hundreds of millions of dollars in Australia. New CCS demonstration projects are due to start operating later this year in the United States and Australia.
At Lacq, Total has fitted one of the plant's 30MW gas-fired boilers with oxyfuel technology, where the fossil fuel is burned in an atmosphere enriched with oxygen. The resulting exhaust gas is then composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide and water vapour, which can be easily separated and stored.
"Total needs to master this new technology," said Luc de Marliave, climate change coordinator at the energy company. "Oxycombustion had never been tested at this scale in such an integrated CCS scheme."
Philippe Paelinck of Alstom, the engineeering company that designed and built the CCS equipment at Lacq, said the experiment was an important milestone. "We first proved the feasibility of retrofitting an installation to carbon capture and storage, but also this will be the first demonstration in Europe of CCS with [existing] integrated CO2 pipeline transportation and storage."
De Marliave said Total chose to test oxyfuel because it could potentially save costs in future. "Our calculations showed that, with oxycombustion in that type of application, you could reduce the cost of capture – which is a large part of the cost of the CCS chain – around two-thirds of the cost roughly. For just capture, existing post combustion technologies would cost you something like 70 euros per tonne of CO2. Oxycombustion could reduce this to 35 euros per tonne."
Despite that, he said Total was still open to the investigating the other types of CCS technology, both pre- and post- combustion. "We are not set on one technology. We selected oxycombusiton for the pilot but it doesn't mean that we are not very much interested in post-combustion as well."
Plans for government-funded CCS demonstration plants across Europe have been moving slowly. The EU wants 12 demonstration plants in operation next decade and has reserved 300m carbon credits from the next stage of the European emissions trading scheme to help fund the technology.
In January, the European Commission proposed earmarking €1.25bn to kickstart carbon capture and storage (CCS) at 11 coal-fired plants across Europe, including four in Britain: the Kingsnorth plant in Kent, Longannet in Fife, Tilbury in Essex and Hatfield in Yorkshire would share €250m under the two-year scheme.