Locals Try Sinking Plan to Store CO2 Underground

Germany's Coal-Burning Plants Are Aiming to Cut Emissions by Burying Them -- and That Isn't Going Over Well in Some Towns
By GUY CHAZAN
Brandenburg, Germany
Ulf Stumpe is scared of carbon dioxide -- but not the stuff blamed for global warming. What worries him is the CO2 a local energy firm wants to inject into the earth thousands of feet under his village.
Mr. Stumpe is fighting plans by Vattenfall AB, the Swedish energy giant, to store millions of tons of the greenhouse gas in saline aquifers under the rolling fields of eastern Germany as part of an effort to reduce carbon emissions.
Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is seen by many governments and energy companies as a key weapon in the battle against climate change. They say it would allow mankind to continue burning coal while reducing emissions believed to be contributing to global warming.
'No CO2 in Our Land'
But as with other new technologies like wind power, local opposition can sometimes thwart global solutions. Germany is in the vanguard of CCS, but grass-roots protests are threatening to derail efforts to deploy the technology -- not just in Mr. Stumpe's Brandenburg home but across the country.
Mr. Stumpe, a 28-year-old veterinarian, is "not a violent man," he says. "But there are people here who will do whatever it takes to stop this."
If local backlashes don't slow adoption, high costs might. CCS has never been tested on a commercial scale in a power plant, and experts at the International Energy Agency say installing the technology will require €1 billion ($1.46 billion) per project -- a sum that some environmentalists say would cost more than other forms of renewable energy.
"Today CCS is not economic," says Dr. John Barry, who leads Royal Dutch Shell PLC's carbon-capture effort. "We're at a high-cost phase where we need outside support to bridge the commercial gap." The hope is that as countries cap their emissions, the price of carbon will gradually rise to make CCS economically viable, he says, while technology costs fall.
That, however, may be a long way off. Vattenfall acknowledges that at the current carbon price, the electricity produced in a CCS plant will be a third more expensive than from a normal station.
CCS involves separating out the CO2 produced by power plants, oil refineries and cement factories and pumping it under pressure into porous rock thousands of feet under the Earth's surface where, the thinking goes, it will stay safely trapped. The basic building blocks have existed for decades. Oil companies have long been injecting CO2 into the ground to improve recovery ratios. Experiments with carbon capture and storage are underway elsewhere. Last Thursday, Ohio-based American Electric Power Corp. began pumping CO2 deep underground beside its Mountaineer coal-fired power plant in New Haven, W. Va.
The logic behind deploying CCS more widely is simple. Global energy demand is expected to be 45% higher in 2030 than it is now, according to the IEA. And with developing countries opening two new coal-fired power stations every week, much of the extra demand will be met by fossil fuels, despite the strong growth in nuclear power and renewable energy.
The European Union is now backing a rollout of carbon-capture technology. It wants to build between 10 and 12 CCS demonstration projects by 2015, and is offering about $1.5 billion from its economic-stimulus package and 300 million carbon credits from its emissions-trading system -- currently valued at about $8.8 billion. The Obama administration has also set aside $2.4 billion for CCS projects.
Vattenfall has an incentive to be in the vanguard of clean coal. As regulation pushes up the price of carbon, the company's coal-fired power stations in Germany will become much more costly to run. Last year, it opened Europe's first CCS pilot plant at the power station Schwarze Pumpe. It is now planning a much bigger demonstration plant in Jänschwalde, near Berlin. Vattenfall plans to pipe the CO2 sequestered there about 95 miles northward and deposit it deep below two small towns in the Brandenburg region, Neutrebbin and Beeskow.
But Vattenfall can't bury the CO2 it sequesters at Schwarze Pumpe because authorities have so far failed to provide the necessary permits. So the gas is either sold for industrial cleaning or just vented into the atmosphere.
Meanwhile, when Vattenfall in April unveiled its plan to store carbon in the Neutrebbin area, it triggered a storm of protest. Campaigners like Mr. Stumpe point to the sudden discharge of CO2 from Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1986 that suffocated more than 1,700 people. But that gas was naturally occurring and, thus far, there have been no known releases of stored CO2.
Still, "people are worried about leaks," says Thomas Lautsch, Vattenfall Europe AG's head of CO2 storage. "They worry their kids will be suffocated, their cows will die, their property values will slump."
To reassure them, Dr. Lautsch, a mining engineer, organized around six town-hall meetings to explain Vattenfall's plans. Germany has more than 40 natural-gas storage sites, many of them under residential areas, he said. If people could accept natural gas on their doorsteps, why not the less-dangerous CO2?
Besides, he told villagers, the saline aquifers here were perfect for CO2 storage. They contain brine that is unfit for human consumption and are capped by solid layers of rock that are impermeable to liquids and gas.
Many scientists back his arguments. They point to the experience of the Norwegian oil company StatoilHydro ASA, which for the last decade has been stripping CO2 out of the natural gas it produces at its Sleipner field in the North Sea and burying it deep underground. None of it has leaked.
"Sleipner is a success story, and there's no reason why it shouldn't work in other places," says Mike Stephenson, head of science at the British Geological Survey. "The science we've done so far shows geological storage is a safe proposition." He added that CCS will typically use formations where oil and gas had been trapped for millions of years.
But in Neutrebbin, Dr. Lautsch's attempts at reassurance met with resistance. Soon, locals were putting up posters in their windows with the words: "We are not guinea pigs!" A group of farmers said they won't let Vattenfall onto their property to conduct tests.
The veterinarian Mr. Stumpe was one of the most active opponents, organizing meetings and getting petitions signed. He says he is worried by the absence of data to show how greenhouse gases will behave decades or centuries after they have been buried.
Vattenfall isn't alone in encountering resistance. RWE AG, one of Germany's largest power producers, is facing opposition to its plans to pump carbon from a new power plant in the Ruhr industrial area to the north German region of Schleswig-Holstein. Vattenfall also had to postpone plans to deposit CO2 in northern Denmark after local farmers blocked access to their land. Its plans for Neutrebbin and Beeskow are also in limbo: The Brandenburg authorities have so far refused to allow the company to explore the area.
Germany's government is also cooling on CCS. It passed a draft law creating a legal framework for carbon capture in April, but then shelved it until after national elections last month, as the anti-carbon campaigns intensified.
Dr. Lautsch says he understands that gaining public acceptance will be an uphill struggle. "It will take a year of dialogue for people to accept what we do," he says.
Write to Guy Chazan at guy.chazan@wsj.com