The first week of November sees Shell officially open its first major carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility, the Quest project. It is in Alberta, Canada and will capture and store about one million tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum. Construction commenced back in September 2012 when the Final Investment Decision (FID) was taken and the plant started up and began operating for the first time in September of this year, just three years later. It is one of only a handful of fully integrated carbon capture and storage facilities operating globally. There are now many facilities that capture CO2 but mainly linked to Enhanced Oil Recovery which provides an income source for these projects. Quest has dedicated CO2 storage, developed in an area some 65 kms from the capture site at a depth of about 2 kms.
The Quest income source is not based on EOR; it has been able to take advantage of the government implemented carbon price that prevails within Alberta. Although the current carbon pricing mechanism has an effective ceiling of $15 per tonne CO2 which isn’t sufficient for CCS, let alone a first of its kind, it nevertheless provides a valuable incentive income to operate the facility which has been built on the back of two substantial capital grants from the Provincial and Federal governments respectively. A supplementary mechanism also in place in Alberta provide credits related to the carbon price mechanism for the early years of a CCS project, providing additional operating revenue for any new facility.
Canada, as it turns out, has become a global leader in CCS. The Quest facility is the second major project to be started up in Canada is as many years, with the Saskpower Boundary Dam project commencing operations this time last year.
As noted, Quest will capture and store approximately one million tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum. It demonstrates how quickly and efficiently large scale CO2 management can be implemented once the fiscal conditions are in place. Quest, which is relatively small in scale for an industry that is used to managing gas processing and transport in the hundreds of millions to billions of tonnes globally, demonstrates both the need for continued expansion of the CCS industry and the importance of carbon pricing policy to drive it forward. This single facility far surpasses the largest solar PV facilities operating around the world in terms of CO2 management. Take for example the Desert Sunlight Solar Farm in California, currently the fourth largest solar PV power station in the world. According to First Solar, it displaces 300,000 tonnes of CO2 annually, less than a third of that captured and permanently stored by Quest.
A key difference though is the use of the word displace. Alternative energy projects don’t directly manage CO2, they generate energy without CO2 emissions. But, as I have noted in previous postings and in my first book, the release of fossil carbon to the atmosphere is more a function of energy prices and resource availability. This means that even when a project like Desert Sunlight operates, the CO2 it notionally displaces may still be released at some other location or at some other time, depending on long term energy prices and extraction economics. There is no doubt that the CO2 is not being emitted right now in California, but that doesn’t necessarily resolve the problem. Quest, by contrast, directly manages the CO2 from fossil fuel extraction.
The requirement to provide alternative energy (i.e. without CO2 emissions) needs to grow, but we shouldn’t imagine that such action, by itself, will fully resolve the climate issue. That will come through the application of carbon pricing mechanisms by governments, driving the further expansion of both the alternative energy and CCS industries as a result.
A video about the Quest project, made by the constructors, Fluor, is available here.
I find it sad that RDS has bought into this failed hypothesis of global warming. I am a retired Senior Staff Environmental Engineer who retired from Shell Oil Co. in 1999 when the U.S. was just being taken over by the Dutch. We did not agree with RDS on global warming.
The following are statements and conclusions from a Report “Carbon Dioxide The Good News” by Dr. Indur Goklany published October 12, 2015. He is a member of the IPCC, a committee of the UN who promotoes catastrophic global warming. He also works for the U.S.Department of Interior. The Report is telling and shows as usual, global warming is a flawed hypothesis.
“Based on the chains of unvalidated computer models, orthodox thinkers on climate change claim that global warming will, among other things, lower food production, increase hunger, cause more extreme weather, increase disease, and threaten water supplies. The cumulative impact will, they claim, diminish living standards and threaten species, and if carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are not curbed soon, pose an existential threat to humanity and the rest of nature. Some claim it may already be too late. The group 350.org, for instance, agitates for reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, currently at 400 ppm, to 350 ppm, a level the earth last experienced in 1988. But since then, global GDP per capita has increased 60%, infant mortality has declined 48%, life expectancy has increased by 5.5 years, and the poverty headcount has dropped from 43% to 17% despite a population increase of 40%. Nostalgia for a 350 ppm world seems somewhat misplaced, if not downright perverse.
Impact Assessments
The approach used in impacts assessments of global warming suffers from three fundamental flaws. First, they rely on climate models that have failed the reality test. Second, they do not fully account for the benefits of carbon dioxide. Third, they implicitly assume that the world of 2100 will not be much different from that of the present – except that we will be emitting more greenhouse gases and the climate will be much warmer. In effect, they assume that for the most part our adaptive capacity will not be any greater than today.
But the world of 2015 is already quite different from that of 1990, and the notion that the world of 2100 will be like that of the baseline year verges on the ludicrous. Moreover, this assumption directly contradicts:
(a) the basic assumption of positive economic growth built into each of the underlying IPCC scenarios
(b) the experience over the past quarter millennium, of relatively rapid technological change and increasing adaptive capacity.
It is also refuted by any review of the changes that have taken place in the human condition and the ordinary person’s life from generation to generation, at least as far back as the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Carbon dioxide levels have risen inexorably since the 1700s. Yet despite this, climate sensitive indicators of human and environmental well being that carbon dioxide affects directly, such as crop yields, food production, prevalence of hunger, access to cleaner water and biological productivity, and those that it affects indirectly, such as living standards and life expectancies, have improved virtually everywhere. In most areas they have never been higher, nor do they show any sustained signs of reversing.”
What a sad state of affairs these days for companies who have bought into this failed hypothesis. All that carries it is simply those who look the other way and really provide blocking for the elite. It will come tumbling down one of these days and the evidence against it continues to build.
Read Goklany’s Report “Carbon Dioxide The Good News”. It tells it like it is.
[…] you’d prefer to read something more hopeful about CCS, try David Hone: Shell officially open its first major carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility, the Quest […]
[…] you’d prefer to read something more hopeful about CCS, try David Hone: Shell officially open its first major carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility, the Quest […]
[…] you’d prefer to read something more hopeful about CCS, try David Hone: Shell officially open its first major carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility, the Quest […]
While enormous efforts been put into understanding of Global warming in relate to greenhouse gas emission. The unexplained phenomenon of prolong high temperature period under the theory of Milankovitch cycle which expected earth temperature get into decline trajectory several thousand years ago. This is quite a fundamental question to be answered when we trying to conclude the consequence of increasing greenhouse gas concentration but seem do not receive adequate efforts if not totally forgotten.
It is not a bad thing to see people making effort to pursue cleaner energy sources. And I have no doubt the amount of extra CO2 & Methane we introduce into atmosphere may significantly boost up the Global warming. But still have to say it is scientifically insufficient to make quantitative conclusion between Global warming and Greenhouse gas concentration down to 1-2 degree C level.
As the Milankovitch cycle expects the Earth should be in chill down path many thousand years ago, and we actually do not know why it still hot. Apart from worry about the coming 1-4 degree C warming and a few meters sea level increase and the consequence to our life. Shouldn’t we also think about the consequence of the ice age which had delay for many thousand years already but has to come anyway because it was caused by Earth’s movements? And the reduction of sea level can go down by 130 meters.