BP and Edison Mission Group (EMG) announced on February 10 that they are planning to build a $1 billion, hydrogen fueled, 500 MW power plant that would sequester the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions produced by the plant.
Petroleum coke would be gasified into a stream of hydrogen and CO2; about 90% of the CO2 would be captured for sequestration. After a clean-up process to remove pollutants and other impurities, the hydrogen stream would be used to fuel gas turbines to generate electricity. The turbine generators would produce virtually no greenhouse gas emissions. The captured CO2 would be compressed and transported by pipeline to an oilfield where it would be injected thousands of feet underground into the oil field, both enhancing oil production and permanently trapping the CO2.
BP previously announced, in June 2005, that a somewhat similar 350MW project in Peterhead, Scotland would reform natural gas into CO2 and hydrogen, use the hydrogen to produce power and inject the CO2 into an oilfield to enhance oil production and sequester the CO2.
The plant would be located alongside BP's Carson refinery, about 20 miles south of Los Angeles. BP and EMG hope to complete detailed engineering and commercial studies in 2006, finalize project investment decisions in 2008 and bring the new power plant online by 2011.
Final project investment decisions will follow further study by the partners and review by the California Energy Commission and the South Coast Air Quality Management District. BP and EMG are beginning project discussions with state and federal government agencies and local stakeholders and are exploring options for selling the electricity the plant would generate. BP is in discussions with Occidental Petroleum to develop options for sequestering the CO2 in Occidental's California oilfields.
The costs of hydrogen power are higher than those of traditional power plant fuels. As a result, the project will depend, in part, on incentives provided in the Federal Energy Policy Act of 2005 for advanced gasification technologies. In addition, continued progress on the California Public Utilities Commission's electricity "resource adequacy" procurement policies will encourage this first-of-its-kind facility.
BP previously announced, in June 2005, a somewhat similar 350MW project in Peterhead, Scotland that would reform natural gas into CO2 and hydrogen, use the hydrogen to produce power and inject the CO2 into an oilfield to enhance oil production and sequester the CO2.
This is an alternate way, from IGCC, to produce green power. Both use a gasification process to produce a hydrogen-CO2 stream, but rather that putting the hydrogen through a Fischer-Tropsch process it uses the hydrogen directly it separates the the hydrogen from the CO2 using the hydrogen to power turbines to produce electricity while sequestering the CO2. Sounds like a similar process, which should cost less about the same as IGCC with sequestration. This plant, with sequestration, is projected to cost about 1/3 more than an IGCC plant without sequestration which seems a little high cost for adding sequestration, maybe the compressor and pipeline add up to that much. I do not know of any costs have been put on an IGCC plant with sequestration. Certainly BP has evaluated the two options. BP claims that this plant does have the additional advantage that all of the components have been demonstrated at full scale, which some claim is not the case for IGCC. The part of the process that may need further development is the gas clean-up process in that gas turbines need better clean up of the syngas than has been demonstrated on coal derived syngas. It seems to me that this argument would apply to both processes. In any event about 10 IGCC plants are in the planning stages.
Comment revised 2/12/02
Resource: BP and Edison Mission Group Plan Major Hydrogen Power Project for California, Press release, February 10, 2005
Technorati tags: electric generation, global warming, energy, technology
I have some trouble with understanding the concept described above. If the CO2 is going to be piped to an oil field and injected underground to enhance recovery of the oil in the field, how will it remain permanently underground?
I am no oil geologist, so my simple minded brain might be missing a few key points.
If an oil field is composed of rather porous rocks with petroleum mixture spread through those rocks at a certain pressure, an oil well drilled into those rocks provides a way for the pressure to be relieved, thus pushing the fluids (gas and oil) to the well and then lifting those up for further processing. Obviously, as more and more gas and oil are removed from this system, the pressure drops and the production falls.
Recovery can be enhanced by injecting a high pressure fluid generally either water, steam or CO2 to increase the pressure. When that occurs, the steam and/or CO2 mixes with the natural gas and oil in the reservoir and all of the mixture flows to the well. The resulting oil, gas and enhancement fluid must then be processed to remove the pressure enhancing fluid, adding some cost, but recovering oil that would not have been available without the pressure boost.
However, WHERE does that enhancing fluid go? I submit that unless there is another expensive step added at the production wells to collect and compress any injected CO2, that it will simply be VENTED to the atmosphere! There is no way to permanently lock the CO2 in the ground if it is being injected into an oil field where there are DESIGNED vents to the atmosphere known as oil wells!
Why would an engineering driven company like a petroleum company think that such a scheme is a technically defensible way to prevent CO2 emissions - I am sure that the engineers know what is going on.
However, BP - like many oil companies - simply cannot get enough of our money. It is not enough to produce the highest annual profit ever reported by a company based in Britain, they have figured out how to design a project that will qualify for US government subsidies (corporate welfare) as an R&D project.
From the above article:
"As a result, the project will depend, in part, on incentives provided in the Federal Energy Policy Act of 2005 for advanced gasification technologies. In addition, continued progress on the California Public Utilities Commission's electricity "resource adequacy" procurement policies will encourage this first-of-its-kind facility."
Posted by: Atomicrod | February 12, 2006 at 07:00 AM
I don't know if I agree with the assessment that it is simpler. If we look at the operations involved:
For IGCC:
gasification yield syngas
clean syngas, removing S and Hg
burn syngas, powering combined-cycle turbines
For this process:
gasification yields syngas
water-gas shift to hydrogen
separate hydrogen from carbon dixoide
burn hydrogen, powering combined-cycle turbines
The chief difference as far as I can see is in the syngas processing. Is it easier to separate the pollutants from syngas, or to shift the gas all the way to hydrogen, and then separate out hydrogen, leaving the pollutants in the CO2 stream that you've already decided to call waste?
Come to think of it, if an IGCC plant were to be built with carbon sequestration in mind, depending on the sequestration method, you could omit cleaning the syngas entirely, if you make sure the pollutants end up in the CO2 waste stream (however, you can't do this if liquid fuel production is part of the plant design: sulfur in particular would have deleterious effects on the liquefaction catalysts).
Posted by: Robert | February 12, 2006 at 03:03 PM
Atomic Rod - I am no geologist either, but I have not heard of anyone in the oil or global warming worlds that disputes that the sequestration system will work. As I understand the process your assumption that the CO2 will mix with the oil is the problem. The C02 does not mix with the oil, it displaces the oil. The flow rate through the rock strata is in the sub-laminar flow regime (very, very slow, Re less than 1) where fluids flowing through pourous media do not mix with each other when brought in contact with each other, but rather one displaces the other. The rock strata is hardly ideal pourous media, so there may be some mixing, but the principle should hold. I spent a large part of my career working on a totally different process which depended on this phenomena and in the case I was using it worked to 99.9% efficieny. I am not knowledgeable as to why the CO2 does not break through when all of the oil is displaced. I assume it has something to do with the fact that you can never recover 100% of the oil from an oil field. See earlier post for an ongoing test of this technique. As pointed out in my comments on that post, this method of EOR has been used in Texas for some time, but the rate of loss of CO2 has never been measured, it has assumed to be at a low rate.
Posted by: Jim from The Energy Blog | February 12, 2006 at 03:43 PM
Robert-You are correct, I have changed my commentary accordingly. A rather mute point is that I intended my comments to apply to both processes with sequestration. As you point out there may be a slight advantage to the BP process in that the gas clean-up may be easier or if nothing else, the fact that BP only has to clean up the hydrogen stream rather than the entire syngas stream.
Posted by: Jim from The Energy Blog | February 12, 2006 at 04:40 PM
This could be some thing more leathal in the end. I hope they know what they're doing! The reason I'm thing like this's when large companies talk in the language that the ordenary people don't understand, it make you think that they are up to something mmmmm
Posted by: John A McKenna | May 09, 2006 at 01:52 AM
Yep Rod, for once we agree. How are they going to keep that CO 2 from coming back up eventually? And who will moniter that?
Industry self-regulation (no-regulation)as usual is my guess.
The energy deficit from separating and pumping all that cO 2 underground, even if it stays there, makes these schemes uneconomical compared to renewables.
Solar collector based algae fuel sequestration produces fuel to offset those costs, and eventually might replace coal as the energy source. That sort of CO 2 remediation might just work as an effective transition.
Posted by: amazingdrx | May 09, 2006 at 10:02 AM
The CO2 is sequestered in different formations than active oil production formations. It is not being used as a method of secondary recovery. That is why the places proposed for sequestration are mature oil fields.
The amount of CO2 generated by man pales in comparison to the CO2 and other greenhouse gases released by mother nature. But it make libs feel good to sequester it, oil and engineering companies make alot of money sequestering it, Al Gore-Quada makes money selling books about it, so it is a win win on all sides..
Posted by: steveo | August 11, 2006 at 11:59 PM
I'm not an expert on this stuff, so I'll ask all of you: has anyone considered the effect that CO2 sequestration would have on the oxygen content of the atmosphere? If the CO2 byproduct is sequestered effectively, wouldn't that be a net drain on the O2 levels? Likewise, wouldn't non-electrolysis Hydrogen lock up O2 into water vapor when burned? I've always wondered how much of a problem this would be if these technologies were widely adopted. How about it? Do I have it all wrong or is there a valid concern?
Posted by: AJ | December 04, 2006 at 07:09 PM
Ok, now I'm more confused than ever. The wikipedia entry for photosynthesis implies that the oxygen released from plants is derived from water molecules, not carbon dioxide. Is that correct? If so, please disregard my previous post.
Posted by: AJ | December 05, 2006 at 06:38 AM
Anyone aware of world-class experts in CO2 sequestration working in any of the big oil companies?
Posted by: CO2 Captor | January 08, 2008 at 10:08 AM
EnCana.
Posted by: Mr. Mister | February 25, 2009 at 02:07 PM