Tankers to sail off with carbon waste

The Sunday Times
April 19, 2009
Danny Fortson

THE global fight against climate change could lead to the creation of a new market: carbon-dioxide shipping.
The world’s biggest cargo carriers, including Maersk and IM Skaugen, have begun talks with power companies in Britain and Europe that could see them build new fleets of tankers specially made to transport the greenhouse gas captured from clean-coal power stations.
The news comes amid a big push by governments to clean up the world’s dirtiest and most plentiful fuel. This week energy secretary Ed Miliband will give the green light to a new generation of coal-fired stations, the first in more than 30 years, but only if they are fitted with experimental carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.
CCS works by capturing carbon dioxide, liquefying it, then piping it underground into geological formations like spent oilfields. The large-scale roll-out of the technology, however, will require a vast new infrastructure to handle the millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere.

Shipping could be cheaper than pumping it through a pipeline to oil fields that are often many miles offshore.
Christian Ingerslev at Maersk said: “Investing in a pipeline is a very high one-off cost. CCS is not commercialised yet so shipping can provide an immediate benefit because it is cheaper. It will be a mix of shipping and pipeline.”
Eon, RWE and Scottish Power, all of which have proposals to build CCS demonstration plants in Britain, have asked Skaugen to carry out feasibility studies into shipping.
Per Arne Nilsson at Skaugen, said: “If you look at Scottish Power’s project [in Longannet, Scotland] or Eon’s [at Kingsnorth, Kent], they are a bit remote. They may never find it economic to transport by pipeline.”
Today there are only four tankers in the world that are purpose-built for shipping carbon dioxide. These are all owned by Coca-Cola, which uses the greenhouse gas to put the fizz in its drinks. Skaugen recently had six ships certified for carbon-dioxide transport, the first large tankers to earn that qualification.
Cargo firms are looking at shipping carbon dioxide from countries with little storage like Japan to the Middle East, where it could be pumped underground into old oilfields.