Carbon Capture and Storage Goes Online in Germany
In an attempt to continue using the large coal deposits bespeckling our planet, while still keeping greenhouse gas emission down, one of Europe’s biggest power companies has turned to Carbon Capture and Storage, or CCS for short.
Vattenfall, a Swedish owned firm, will be using CCS at the site of the new “Schwarze Pumpe”, Black Pump, located in the Lausitz region in the State of Brandenburg. The pilot unit, which has a thermal capacity of 30 megawatts, has cost approximately Euro 70 million over the past 15 months.
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“The pilot unit is a milestone on the way to converting coal into electricity that is almost free of emissions,” said Vattenfall’s CEO and President Lars G. Josefsson at the official commencement of operations on Tuesday. “It represents the first ever transition from lab to reality. Our intention is to make a decisive contribution to global climate protection.”
Some environmental groups are unhappy though, describing CCS and Black Pump specifically as a cosmetic cover up. They believe that by financing projects such as these, attention and funding is being taken away from other, cleaner methods of powering our future.
German’s BUND pressure group has slammed CCS as a mere “fig leaf” leaving companies and governments to continue building coal-fired power plants, while appearing to care about global warming. “Vattenfall managers talk a lot about supposedly environmentally friendly coal power stations but they are still planning and building conventional coal-fired power stations with high levels of CO2 emissions,” BUND’s energy spokesman Thorben Becker said.
Normally I would be 100% behind anyone taking on the government regarding coal-fired plants. But spending much of my time reporting on renewable energies, I know just how far we have to go before we could even hope to rely on them. If nothing else, CCS provides a temporary stall, when all we have is coal and a long road exists ahead of us before we get to relying on the Sun or wind.
Carbon capture and storage is the collection of carbon dioxide from large point sources such as coal-fired power plants and storing the emissions away from the atmosphere. For example, the Black Pump will be dispensing its carbon emissions into depleted gas and oil fields. Considering how new this technology is, we obviously do not have long-term answers as to what will happen.
Image Courtesy of Vattenfall
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The Europeans seem to be so far ahead of us here in the U.S. We need to change that. Great Post as always!
http://thealternativeenergyinvestor.blogspot.com
Carbon capture and storage has value, in my opinion, only if the technology can be retrofitted onto existing coal burning plants.
If we have to build more coal burning plants in order to use CCS technology, then it would make more sense to build energy facilities using technologies that are already safe and clean such as wind and solar.
Otherwise, CCS is essentially putting a dress on a pig.
Quote from the Wikipedia article on Carbon Capturing and Storage:
“Although CO2 has been injected into geological formations for various purposes, the long term storage of CO2 is a relatively untried concept. The first large-scale CCS power plant will begin operating in September 2008 in the eastern German town of Schwarze Pumpe in the hope of answering questions about the long-term prospects of CCS.
CCS applied to a modern conventional power plant could reduce CO2 emissions to the atmosphere by approximately 80-90% compared to a plant without CCS. Capturing and compressing CO2 requires much energy and would increase the fuel needs of a coal-fired plant with CCS by about 25%. These and other system costs are estimated to increase the cost of energy from a new power plant with CCS by 21-91%. These estimates apply to purpose-built plants near a storage location: applying the technology to preexisting plants or plants far from a storage location will be more expensive.”
And from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarze_Pumpe:
“On 26 May 2006 construction work started on the world’s first CO2-free coal power plant in the Schwarze Pumpe industrial district. The plant is based on a concept called Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS), which means that carbon emissions will be captured and compressed to 1⁄500th their orignal volume, liquefying the gas. It will then be forced 1,000 metres (3,300 ft) below the soil into porous rock where it is believed that it will remain for thousands of years without exacerbating global warming. The project, which has cost some 70 million Euros, was funded entirely by the Swedish company Vattenfall AB and will go into service in September 2008. The power plant is a pilot project to serve as a prototype for future full-scale power plants.”
In my opinion, you can compare Coal Fired Power Plants using CSS with a Nuclear Power Plant. Both aren’t a 100% clean. We just store the bad stuff somewhere deep in the earth and think that that’s a solution. It isn’t.
And have you wondered why Vattenfall has payed for this project all by itself? Why didn’t they get some kind of government funding? Perhaps that is because it is essential for a company such as Vattenfall to keep Coal Fired Power Plants alive, because it is a centralised power-production that makes people dependant on it. If everyone had solar panels on their roofs, then they wouldn’t make any money, right?
I realise that this statement might be somewhat shortsighted, leaving out a lot of other options, but I wouldn’t be surprised if these things account a substantial part in the decision making.
Why not invest in Geo-thermal power plants, Vattenfall? Or let customers rent/lease solar panels, so they dont have the high upfront cost as a deal-breaker.
I do agree with Brian however, that CCS could be of value if it was possible to retrofit them onto existing Coal Fired Power Plants. Though it would still be better to replace them with 100% renewable energy production.
The existence of a 30 MW pilot facility might be useful if operational data can be released to other decision makers.
For example - compared to a similar sized plant without carbon capture, how fuel efficient is the plant? How much additional coal has to be mined to cover the energy cost of separating and compressing the CO2?
Will there be monitoring put into place to provide some indication on the permanence of the storage? Will the stored gas work its way back into the atmosphere through the same seams that allowed the natural gas to be extracted in the first place? After all, the location of storage is reported to be “depleted gas and oil fields”.
Inquiring and skeptical minds really want to know!
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The most intriguing concept for CCS was developed by a grad student at MIT and it involved deep sea sediment deposits. It would involve the reverse of an offshore drilling rig and pump compressed CO2 down deep into the ocean floor to a level where it would form a hydrate and remain stable. The compression is very energy intensive and the pumping infrastructure is expensive. This would only be useful for powerplants near the coastal areas.
We can tinker with CCS, but getting away from coal will be absolutely necessary IMHO.