Carbon capture facility to go live

The first power station retro-fitted with Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology is due to go live but environmental campaigners and experts claim the technology could be a dangerous distraction.

According to reports, a facility in France owned by power company Total has been equipped with CCS technology and is due to be activated this month.

Located in the Lacq region of south-west France, Total claims the project will essentially work by reversing the action of an existing natural gas plant. Rather than piping natural gas from a rock reservoir to the processing plant, concentrated CO2 will instead be pumped the other way down the pipeline into the empty rock formation which used to house the natural gas.

"For CO2 transport, the pilot will take advantage of the existing pipeline used for the past 30 years to export natural gas extracted from the Rousse field to the treatment plant at Lacq. During the pilot, CO2 will simply be piped in the opposite direction," Total claimed in a report on the project.

Total's executive vice president of sustainable development and the environment Jean-Michel Gires said that the Rousse field makes perfect sense for carbon capture as it is natural existing rock formation designed for the purpose.

"The great thing about the natural gas field is that the natural gas does not escape naturally as it is covered by an impermeable layer clay. The same goes with carbon capture," he said.

Gires said that Total was likely to receive a lot of interest if the project proves a success.

"Widespread use of this technology could eventually account for 20 per cent of existing CO2 emissions – the rewards would be pretty high," he said.

But Gires admitted that the technology is not applicable to every situation where carbon storage may be required.

"This technology has limited number of applications. It is only really for large-scale applications involving boilers and furnaces. This technology is not designed for small domestic furnaces or boilers in commercial premises or homes or car exhaust systems which emit relatively diffuse carbon emissions," he said.

Total claims to supply about two per cent of the heating and automotive fuels used worldwide and as a manufacturer emits an average of 60 million metric tons of CO2 a year. The company claims that method developed at Lacq could help sequester about 150,000 metric tons of CO2 over a two-year period.

But despite Total's hopes for the Lacq project, some climate change experts are sceptical about the real usefulness of CCS at the moment as the technology is still unproved. In a recent paper, How ready is ‘capture ready’? Preparing the UK power sector for carbon capture and storage, Dr Nils Markusson and Prof Stuart Haszeldine from the University of Edinburgh claimed that despite the promise of CCS technology, the problem remains of whether new coal plants should be built merely on the premise that capture technology will prove effective.

"The spectre to avoid is ‘carbon lock-in’ where new (or retrofitted) fossil fuel generating plant is built during the timespan when climate change imperatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are known, but before a fully functioning CCS system becomes available for addition to new plants," the report stated.

A recent report from environmental campaigners Greenpeace echoed similar fears over building new coal plants on the promise of effective CCS technology at some later date.

"The increase in greenhouse gas emissions needs to be halted in the next decade and emissions then need to be cut significantly," Greenpeace stated. " CCS will not be ready in time. Ironically, the suggestion that the technology may be made to work some time in the future is being used to justify building new coal-fired power plants without any form of carbon 'capture'."