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Record level of CCS projects in the pipeline
26/10/2022
News
As of September 2022, 196 carbon capture and storage projects are in the pipeline worldwide according to the new 2022 GCCSI report - marking a 44% growth in the number of CCS facilities since the previous GCCSI report in 2021. Yet just 30 facilities are currently operational.
In the past year, ‘we’ve seen CCS become increasingly commercial and competitive in many countries,’ asserts Jarad Daniels, CEO of the Global CCS Institute. The momentum behind carbon capture and storage (CCS) has continued to gather pace. ‘As a mature and well understood technology, companies seeking to deploy CCS have embraced robust policy to strengthen the business case for doing so,’ he adds.
Furthermore, Daniels expects to see more strategic partnerships and collaboration driving deployment, particularly through CCS networks.
This year has also seen ‘unprecedented interest and engagement in direct air capture with CCS (DACCS), with billions of dollars in funding allocated to scale-up this technology’, he notes. Indeed the outlook for CCS ‘has never been more positive,’ he says.
GCCSI reports that 30 CCS facilities are currently operational, 11 in construction, 78 in advanced development, 75 in early development and two suspended. The counts include some transport and storage projects that do not include capture, while providing ‘essential infrastructure for the industry to develop.’
Notable projects in the last 12 months include: the Klemestrud waste-to-energy CCS project in Norway which has moved to the construction stage having secured funding. Also the Glacier CCS project, where CCS technology provider Entropy has commissioned a commercial-scale CO2 capture facility on a natural gas-fired reciprocating engine, which is seen as ‘an important milestone’ given the potential of future carbon capture serving natural gas streams worldwide, with the projected rise of blue hydrogen streams. Moreover, Air Products announced its world-scale blue hydrogen project in Louisiana, USA, incorporating autothermal reforming hydrogen production to facilitate high CO2 production rates. While ORCA, the world’s first direct air capture with carbon storage (DACCS) facility, was commissioned in Iceland, followed by announcement of the MAMMOTH project.
In Australia, the Bayu-Undan project by Santos has moved into front-end engineering and design (FEED), aiming to capture CO2 from LNG production in Darwin and transport it via pipeline across the maritime border between Australia and Timor-Leste for offshore geological storage. Occidental in partnership with DACCS technology company Carbon Engineering announced plans to commence work on a 500,000 t/y DAC project in the Permian Basin in the US, capable of scaling up to 1mn t/y capacity.
This is a key step of Occidental’s plans to develop a fleet of 70 such facilities around the world by 2035.
Nevertheless, despite the optimism of the new GCCSI report it is worth pointing out that a recent report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (NEWS 14/9/2022) reports that seven of the 13 large-scale CCS and CCUS projects worldwide (which account for 55% of capacity) have under-performed, two failed and one was mothballed. Report author Bruce Robertson suggested that many projects ‘have failed or continue to fail over the past 50 years.’
