ScottishPower begins clean energy tests at Longannet power station

The Times
May 30, 2009

ScottishPower took a big step forward in the attempt to produce carbon-free energy from coal yesterday when it switched on newly installed machinery at Longannet power station in Fife.
The company is bidding to win a £1 billion government competition to develop the technology needed to fit carbon capture and storage technology to a coal-fired power station — described as the holy grail of alternative energy.
However, it emerged that Norwegian rather than Scottish companies stand to be the big winners if the bid succeeds. At the heart of the process is a technology that is Norwegian-owned and which ScottishPower and other companies will have to pay for if carbon capture becomes big business.
The eventual aim is to capture about 90 per cent of the carbon dioxide that goes up power station chimneys, Scotland’s biggest single emitter of climate-changing gases. This would go a long way towards the target of cutting the country’s harmful emissions by 50 per cent from 1990 levels by 2030.

he Scottish and British governments have claimed that there is potentially a big economic gain if Britain can become a leader in finding a cheap technology to fit to the estimated 50,000 fossil-fuelled power stations around the world.
ScottishPower has formed a consortium with Aker Clean Carbon of Norway, which is developing the capturing technology, and Marathon Oil, which is working on the pipelines and undersea installations needed to transport and store carbon dioxide under the North Sea.
The machinery switched on yesterday, which belongs to Aker, will process less than 0.5 per cent of Longannet’s exhaust gases, equivalent to 1 megawatt (MW) of electricity output. The tests will take 6-7 months to find the most efficient and cheapest way of extracting the carbon dioxide.
Critical to the success of the tests is reducing the amount of energy needed to capture carbon. Current technologies would require between 25-30 per cent of Longannet’s electricity output to be diverted into carbon capture if all of the station’s emissions were to be cleaned up.
Tony Corless, ScottishPower’s technical manager of the capturing equipment, explained that the process involved using nitrogen-hydrogen compounds called amines which stick to carbon dioxide, enabling it to be extracted from other exhaust gases. “The holy grail is to get a low-energy amine,” Mr Corless said, adding that it was hoped to reduce the amount of energy used in carbon capture to about 12 per cent of Longannet’s power output.
This technology, however, will not belong to ScottishPower. It will only license it for use from SOLVit, a Norwegian consortium in which Aker Clean Carbon is the main partner with Sintef, a Norwegian research company, and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Steven Marshall, a ScottishPower executive overseeing the carbon project, said that the company hoped to profit by selling the expertise accumulated in making a carbon capture project technically and economically viable.
Duncan McLaren, chief executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland, said that it favoured fitting carbon capture and storage technology to existing coal-fired power stations, but raised concern that it could lead to more fossil-fuelled power stations being built at the expense of developing renewable power.