Carbon capture and storage

A shiny new pipe dream

Capturing the carbon dioxide from power stations is not hard. But it is expensive. A new project in Norway aims to make it cheaper

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Terence Hale

Carbon capture and storage. “Captivity thence captive, us to win”. Carbon capture solution is simple plant trees.

Petroleum Technology

An alternative view is that capturing CO2 from a power plant (especially a coal-fired one), is in fact rather hard for a non-obvious reason. The “Elephant-in-the-corner” that people do not like to talk about is that the trace NOx & SOx present in the flue gases tend to exothermically combine with the water vapor and oxygen to make (nitric and sulfuric) acids. These acids then “poison” the amine solution by forming heat stable salts, which eventually prevent the amine solution being regenerated. CO2 capture can thereby grind to a halt, until the amine solution is (expensively) replaced. AEP has indicated in the past a very low threshold for combined NOx & SOx of just several ppm. A major attraction of the Chilled Ammonia process was supposed to be a much higher tolerance (e.g. 20 ppm) – which is still a highly-challenging task to meet consistently. For example, the unscrubbed flue gases of a coal-fired power plant may contain 2,000 ppm of SO2 alone. Unfortunately, the 21-month “Validation” test of Alstom’s Chilled Ammonia approach at AEP’s Mountaineer coal-fired power plant succeeded in capturing and sequestering only a small fraction of the amount of CO2 that had been targeted.
It is most laudable that Statoil is now (at considerable expense) providing worldwide leadership at the Mongstad Test Center by not only sensibly formally testing the energy requirements for CO2 capture of Aker Clean Carbon’s special amine solution and of Alstom’s Chilled Ammonia solution, but also testing the tolerance of the two solvents of NOx (& even SO2?). Mongstad’s flexible set-up should provide invaluable and long overdue results, which many should benefit from.
Most of the focus on CCS to date has been on “single-technology” approaches. This is natural as vendors have a strong economic incentive to promote their own technology. However, we may yet find that hybrid approaches (of processes that have been dismissed as flawed as an entire process) may have a lower energy and financial cost for CO2 capture, a much smaller physical footprint, and a tolerance of NOx & SOx that is orders of magnitude higher. Even in CCS, might Diversity offer a compelling benefit?

AngryViking in reply to guest-iwimelw

May I ask where I can read more on your revolutionary hypothesis on global warming? At a single stroke you have rendered the work of thousands of scientists obsolete. Looking forward to next years Nobel's ceremony.


"If people are serious about carbon capture and storage, they will have to pay for it."

Where are these "people"? Not in America or China at least.


Actually it's time for intelligent life on earth to reject and ignore these theories. They are fraudulent and incompetent.
Our respected Economist even says that ocean levels are rising. This is a fraud.
Carbon capture is so contrary to nature that it's insane.
Plant life in oceans, plankton, converts CO2 to oxygen.
The wrong kind of people are in control of these issues, and I think the Economist is beholden to them.



It is true that CCS is expensive at the moment, but its cost has been reduced in recent years. In 2009 a paper published at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government estimated costs between $100-150 per tonne of CO2 for first-of-a-kind plants. Now, professor Herzog estimates price in the range of $50-100

Also, the CCS project in Alberta announced its cancellation on April 26th, not May 1st. Although it is true that the CO2 economics for this project influenced in the decision, the prices of gas also influenced considerably. Many companies across the world are experiencing losses because of low prices for gas due to the exploitation of shale gas.

Jose Condor, Sr Analyst Alberta Department of Energy, Edmonton, Canada


A technically and economically successful CSS program would be necessary to responsibly continue to burn fossil fuels. Some say CSS is an unattainable panacea, used to justify business as usual, thereby delaying the change to renewable energy and ignoring the effects of fossil fuel use. I'm comfortable, and think there is much to be said for energy produced and used just the way it is now. So, I hope it works.

The eyes of the world will be on this project. And its success or failure may affect the course of technology, geopolitics, maybe even humanity. Gee, I hope it works, but if it doesn't, I'd like to know that too.


This is more about money than anything else. It is not unlike the nuclear waste issue which has no answer but to somehow store it for thousands or millions of years instead of finding a way to neutralize it so it is not a threat to humans or environment. Here with this crazy carbon capture scheme it is the same. Except this time we're going to bury it...but it doesn't make it go sits there until one day it will find a way to re-release into the environment. Earthquakes, earth shifts, seeping out of the earth in ways we cannot even envision as we have no long-term history for unpredictable outcomes. God forbid this should happen in a sudden rush...can you imagine what would happen to the planet? We have to be more mindful about rushing into new fandangle ideas that solve one problem only to create another. This gentleman singing the praises of his invention in Norway is making a bundle. Let's find a way to just stop putting pollution into our atmosphere from the get go, not deferring the problem for another day and another generation with great risk for a catastrophic event (e.g. nuclear waste)

guest-wssieia in reply to GeoSly

In politics, you follow the money - in organic chemistry, you follow the carbon. Plants take in CO2 during the day, making sugars, and release CO2 at night when they make energy from the sugars. The only way to take CO2 and not put it back is to incorporate the carbon into the plant by growing more wood, more leaves, etc. And whatever carbon is in the plant material is released again as CO2 when the plant is eaten or decays. On balance, no CO2 is removed except that which turns into sediments - which you can see if you follow the carbon.

CO2 is literally out of control; we are changing the composition of the air and we have no way to stop. I doubt we'll stop until carbon-free sources of energy are cheaper than burning carbon. Research is the pressing need at the moment (I don't have much patience for subsidies).

The amount of carbon on earth is fixed, if you include all the buried carbon. But that's no comfort - when that carbon started to be buried, ages ago, the percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was higher than any animal can survive. If we put all the earth's buried carbon back in circulation at once, we would return to that state.

Nice comment, a positive one!!

Ten years ago shale gas and oil was a marginal uneconomic process. Now it is set to transform global supply.

Today CCS is a marginal uneconomic process. With work like the above going on, tomorrow it will likely be transformational because unlike other strategies it could be scalable to match the worlds energy resources.

Similarly renewables will also become more economic

And nuclear, despite recent setbacks, will be a significant contributor.

We might also find that the outcome will be a changing mix of all of the above, or maybe CERN, or someone in a shed somewhere, will change the whole game and render our plans moot?

Randy T in reply to guest-iwimelw

You've completely ignored any energy transfer in or out of the atmosphere via radiation which is how ~100% of it is transferred.

All else equal, adding heat would only temporarily raise the temperatures. The raised temperature would then increase the amount of longwave radiation that is emitted and get rid of that heat. The new equilibrium would be reached very quickly. Adding heat (from burning) cannot result in a sustained increase in temperatures unless there are also changes to the atmospheric composition which increase the amount of long-wave radiation that is reabsorbed.

So, I guess it is theoreticaly possible that the heat is a contributor, but alone it is not even a factor.

Not ignorant, but rather perceptive! There is a small group in Utah with some DoE funding seeking to take advantage of exactly this angle. In Canada, a small group is testing cryogenic capture of CO2 in liquid form - which needs even less cooling.
Of more commercial interest is however a large new cryogenic CO2 capture plant in the Rockies, with an energy cost for a stream with 80% CO2 of just 0.17 GJ/ton of CO2 captured. This process is therefore an ideal “last step” in the type of hybrid approach referred to in my Post above. The energy cost of 0.17 GJ/ton of CO2 captured (based on detailed correspondence with the manufacturer) may be compared to the more than 4 GJ/ton of CO2 (including compression) commonly associated with most amine plants. Perhaps Aker Clean Carbon can do much better than this? We hope so, and we shall soon find out. That is why the world should be grateful for the important Mongstad initiative. Perhaps the Mongstad test results will help the UK develop some momentum with their own CCS program, once we all have some hard results to look at. Amine-based capture of CO2 from the flue gases of a gas-fired power plant is not new though. It was done on a commercial basis for a number of years in Massachusetts.


Our company recently received an invitation. The caller was an electricity generating plant. The auction was a surplus of carbon dioxide resulting from the 1,000 megawatt power plant, the output of power plant smokestacks.
We've contacted various technology vendor companies. Almost all of them replied that it was expensive and not affordable.
Interestingly, the 180 km distance from the plant, there is a workshop production of carbon dioxide from natural gas. The shop sells its CO2 to soft drink manufacturers!
In our area, the price is 30 cents per kilogram of carbon dioxide under standard conditions. It can be seen, collected carbon can be profitable.
Thermal power plants emit substantial quantities of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. With specific legislation, thermal power plants produce carbon dioxide should be the only license holders.
Noteworthy that the carbon dioxide produced in thermal power plants is economically recyclable. Technology can be defined for it. Government regulatory requirements will help to implement this critical issue. Concentration of carbon dioxide produced in power plants is a potential that should immediately be converted to actual possibilities.
Hospitals, industrial and manufacturing plants, airports, leisure centers, shopping centres, academic centers, train stations, subways etc are major CHP customers . Financial interests is an important issue for these customers. These centers can pay a lower energy prices. Prorated overhead costs are for the power plants too. The fuel is supplied with the best efficiency of energy utilization. These are huge amounts of savings.


WAKE UP PEOPLE1 Carbon dioxide is not the cause of global warming. It's the heat emitted by the combustion of the fossil fuels, (as well as from nuclear power). Removing CO2 from the stacks is like locking the barn door after the horse is gone! The heat emitted is enough by itself to raise the atmospheric temperature annually by 0.17^F by our present consumption rates until equilibrium is reached. It is actually rising at a rate of 0.04*F annually due to melting of glaciers and heating of the rest of the earth's mass.

The combustion (or co-firing) of Biomass for power generation, in conjunction with CCS, can obviously be carbon negative. Lovelock has argued that if seasonal crop residues are used, the benefit can be very large indeed. This approach (including variations with Biochar) is very much more economic than the various exotic schemes for Air Capture of CO2 currently being promoted.
Biochar (with its ability to adsorb moisture and foster beneficial microbial growth) may allow trees to be grown in currently arid areas.

SET Sail

They should focus on capturing methane, for instance from farms where cows produce tons of such environmental hazard and source of energy.


is it really that global warming originate from the released of CO2？ scientists even cannot give a clearly explanation to us~~



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