UKCCSRC - Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) Flexible Funding 2018 Archives

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Stuart Gilfillan (PI) and Emma Martin-Roberts (PDRA), at the University of Edinburgh, were awarded funding in our Flexible Funding 2018 call to investigate “Resolving CO₂ trapping and tracking CO₂ migration in the Carbon Management Canada Field Research Station, Canada, using inherent tracing tools.”

Improvements in CO₂ monitoring are needed to provide regulator and public assurance of secure CO₂ storage, both during and following injection operations. The monitoring tools should allow the fate of the injected CO₂ to be quantified and provide reassurance that CO₂ is not leaking from the storage site.

The ability to identify buoyant and potentially mobile structurally retained CO₂, and residual or solubility trapped CO₂, is essential to understand how to engineer a secure storage site. However, this is difficult to measure and often poses the single greatest uncertainty in a CCUS project. To date, few studies have attempted to provide a full assessment of residually and solubility stored CO₂ from within the storage site at reservoir scale. Furthermore, leakage of CO₂ from a breached storage site may intercept shallow aquifers and escape to the atmosphere, which can be hazardous to both ecosystems and human health. Whilst artificial chemical tracers have proved to be successful at tracking CO₂ injection at the pilot scale, these tracer compounds are expensive and their co-injection can be cost prohibitive at commercial scale storage sites, where millions of tonnes of CO₂ will be injected over decades.

The aim of this project was to determine the fate of CO₂ after its injection into the subsurface. This was achieved geochemically, using a combination of inherent noble gas and stable isotopes to quantify the amount of CO₂ dissolved. This work also set out to establish the effectiveness of inherent tracers in identifying CO₂ migration from a storage site.

We worked with one of the world’s leading research organisations focused on CCS – the Containment and Monitoring Institute of Carbon Management Canada – who operate a dedicated research facility focused on CO₂ storage, their Field Research Station (FRS) located near the town of Brooks in Alberta. At the start of this project, the site had secured $9M of Federal and Provincial Government funding providing a unique opportunity to develop, refine and calibrate monitoring systems and technologies. The project also had the support of Natural Resources Canada, who undertake bi-monthly sampling of the shallow groundwaters above the FRS, and this programme of work complimented their ongoing monitoring operation.

As with any research that requires experimental work, the sampling campaign was impacted by COVID-19, meaning travel to Canada could not take place in the planned timeframe. However, work remained on previous samples that were obtained from the site for earlier projects (Figure 1), and we were able to apply the core aims of this research to the already collected, but unanalysed data. In collaboration with partners at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC), the remaining samples underwent analysis for noble gases (He, Ne, Ar, Kr, Xe) and major gas compositions including d¹³C and dD.

Figure 1: Copper tubes used to collect gas samples for stable isotope and noble gas analyses

The results of the work presented the first multi-well gas and groundwater characterisation of the geochemical baseline at the FRS. We found that all our sampled gases exhibited extremely low CO₂ concentrations, implying that bulk gas monitoring may be an effective first step to identify CO₂ migration. However, we also discovered pervasive biogenic methane (CH₄) in both groundwater and gases within the stratigraphy, which contain numerous coal seams, making any upwardly migrating CO₂ harder to monitor.

Results gained from the noble gas measurements implied the presence of a deep crustal flux (i.e., high values of radiogenic ⁴He) at the site. In contrast, the measured ⁴He concentrations in the shallowest groundwaters at the site were much lower, indicating ⁴He loss. We also found that the injected CO₂ was low in helium, neon and argon concentrations, yet enriched in krypton and xenon (relative to argon). This key observation allowed us to assess the effectiveness of the specific isotopes of these gases as inherent noble gas fingerprints for geochemical tracing of the injected CO₂ at the FRS. While specific to our research site, we were encouraged to learn that this modelling technique highlighted that, using certain noble gases, we were able to trace the signature of injected CO₂ in background gas samples with high and confident resolution – an encouraging step for the future use of noble gases in providing assurance of CO₂ storage security.

While the challenges of a global pandemic caused some delays and modification to the research, it also presented us with other unforeseen opportunities. It has allowed us to further analyse the already acquired data and apply this to previously published findings within the same sedimentary basin. We now have a basis for a follow-up study and related research paper focusing on the provenance of the economically important noble gases, such as helium, in the Alberta region.

Additionally, while waiting for key sample analysis we were also able to produce and publish a collaborative review paper highlighting the status and challenges facing carbon capture and storage over the last decade. The added time gave us an ideal opportunity to reassess efforts over the last decade and, importantly, to project and visualise the levels of dedicated geological storage required to meet future CO₂ emission reduction targets.

Contact: stuart.gilfillan@ed.ac.uk

Chenggong Sun, Xin Liu, Hao Liu and Colin Snape, at the University of Nottingham, were awarded funding in the UKCCSRC’s Flexible Funding 2018 Call to look at “Scalable step-change carbon materials achieving high CO2 adsorption capacity and selectivity at practical flue gas temperatures for potential breakthrough cost reduction”.

Adsorption-based CO2 capture is commonly recognised for its enormous potential to achieve breakthrough cost reductions, with the use of carbon-based physical adsorbents showing the most promise due to their unparalleled properties such as fast adsorption rate, moderate heat of adsorption and superior stability against thermal, oxidative and hydrolytic degradations. However, none of the carbon materials reported so far are able to achieve appreciable CO2 capacities without flue gas deep cooling down to ambient or even lower temperatures. In the research funded by UKCCSRC, a new class of novel carbon materials able to operate with high selective CO2 capacity at realistic flue gas temperatures (greater or equal to 40^oC) has been developed from using polyisocyanurate/polyurethane as the carbon precursor.

Prepared from using a facile one-step compaction–activation methodology, the new carbon materials are highly characterised by its hierarchical three-dimensional CO2-sieving carbon architectures with strong CO2-polarising surface chemistry. Tested at realistic flue gas temperatures of 40–70^oC and a CO2 partial pressure of 0.15 bar, the best performing materials with moderate heat of adsorption (35 – 45 KJ/mol) were found to have exceedingly high reversible CO2 capacities of up to 2.30 mmol/g at 40^oC and 1.90 mmol/g at 70^oC, which represent the highest capacity ever reported at the adsorption temperatures. Advanced characterisations suggest that the unique geometry and chemistry of the carbon precursor, coupled with the characteristics of the compaction–activation protocol, are responsible for the CO2-sieving structures and capacities of the 3D carbon architectures.

Novel carbon materials

Pilot tests and advanced characterisations demonstrate that the energy requirement of CO2 capture with the carbon materials in a fluidised bed or moving bed system can be reduced down to 0.93 ~ 1.06 GJ/ton-CO2, which is less than half of the energy requirement of other capture systems with advanced solvents and/or immobilised polyamine sorbents (2 – 3 GJ/ton-CO2).

Chenggong Sun, Faculty of Engineering, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD
cheng-gong.sun@nottingham.ac.uk; Tel: 0115 7484577

We’re excited to share the blog report from Dr Vincenzo Spallina (University of Manchester) on his 2018 Flexible Funding research project, CLYCHING – CLean hYdrogen and CHemicals production via chemical loopING:

Chemical looping reforming with packed bed reactors has been demonstrated to achieve high performance for hydrogen chemicals production at lower cost and reduced CO₂ emissions than existing benchmark technologies based on steam and autothermal reforming with CO₂ separation using chemical solvent.

Figure 1: Schematic of the CLYCHING concept

The validity and robustness of the technology has been demonstrated at laboratory scale and from a modelling point of view at the University of Manchester.

The collaboration and interactions with our project partners, Johnson Matthey and Advisian, have been extremely important for the success of the project and the research activity is still continuing in further development.

The flexible funding provided by UKCCSRC for the CLYCHING project has supported this research to boost its development and move to higher demonstration level. Currently, a lot of attention has been brought to this technology from the scientific and industrial community. As a result, two follow up projects are currently ongoing funded by EU commission (H₂020 GLAMOUR, GA 884197) and a new BEIS project has been selected for the feasibility study in the framework of BEIS Low Carbon Hydrogen Supply 2. The results of the project have been already published in two papers (Pereira et al. (2020) and Argyris et al. (2022)) in excellent journals and 2 more papers will be published soon.

Key results

The experimental research activity has been focused on testing laboratory large scale packed bed reactor dynamically operated up to 1000°C, and 5 bar and 40 NLPM using different gas compositions representative of industrial waste gases, renewable feedstock and other relevant feedstocks in chemical, oil & gas and energy industry. The oxygen carrier materials tested in this project were provided by Johnson Matthey.

Figure 2 Outlet molar fractions (dry) during complete CLR cycle

The results of the experimental campaign have demonstrated that: i) the initial solid temperature above 600°C is enough to achieve good conversion during oxidation and heat up the bed to high temperature for the reduction and reforming; ii) the effect of pressure is limited in terms of conversion; iii) the endothermic reactions of dry and steam reforming occur in an adiabatic reactor using the heat accumulated during the reduction/oxidation. The full CLR cycle has been run for 4 consecutive cycles in the facility at University of Manchester with controlled heat losses (Figure 2).

In terms of process modelling and feasibility study, the main research has focused on comparing the performance of the CLYCHING process with other benchmark technologies (see Table 1). These studies were supported by previous research performed on other techno-economic assessment for the production of large scale methanol and hydrogen (Spallina et al. 2018) The first study on ammonia production (Pereira et al. (2020), has demonstrated that the cost of NH₃ can decrease by 10% compared to the conventional multi-stage reformer process integrated with CO₂ separation plant with MDEA scurbbing. For a 500 kTPY, overall 7 reactors are needed (including one spare reactor to allow maintenance and avoid disruption in the operation).

Table 1: comparison of the techno-economic performance of CLYCHING and other benchmark processes.

		CO₂ emissions (CCR)			CAPEX (TPC)		Cost of product		Cost of CO₂ avoidance
		kg_CO₂/ton_i (%)			M€		€/ton_i		€/ton_CO₂
Process	Plant size	Bench.	CLYCHING	Bench.		CLYCHING	Bench.	CLYCHING	Bench.	CLYCHING
Hydrogen	30 kNm³/h	3470 (64%)	190 (98%)		73.4	61.8	2006	2190	70.6	59.8
Hydrogen	30 kNm³/h	950 (90%)	190 (98%)		107	61.8	2450	2190	95.6	59.8
Methanol	10 kTPD	220 (-)	6 (>98%)		2000	1150	368.9	304	–	-303
Ammonia	500 kTPY	440 (>73%)	3 (>99%)		680	593.6	556	527.6	17.6	-5
FT- liquids	52 kbbl/d	47 (>95%)	23 (>97%)		3051	2423	430	415	13.6	-1

Another feasibility study has been published (Argyris et al. (2022)) on-site H₂ generation plant (130 Nm³/h) with integrated CO₂ capture operated with dynamic PSA and taking into account the impact of heat losses in terms of heat management and control. The modelling results have shown that fluctuations derived by the integration of two dynamic processes only affect the production of CO₂ (never above ±20% of the concentration) and it can be greatly reduced by using a blowtank unit after the PSA, otherwise the oscillation are marginals.

Acknowledgements

Vincenzo Spallina acknowledges the UKCCSRC for providing the funding of this research. The fruitful support and contribution of Johnson Matthey Technology Centre and Advisian in the preparation, industrial development and realisation of this project are also highly acknowledged.

We’re pleased to share the press release on some key findings from Dr Stuart Gilfillan’s 2018 Flexible Funded project, Resolving CO₂ trapping and tracking CO₂ migration in the Carbon Management Canada Field Research Station, Canada, using inherent tracing tools, from our colleagues at SCCS:

Absence of market price or reward for storing CO₂ to benefit the climate: World leaders urged to address this issue during COP26 talks

Deployment of the climate technology, carbon capture and storage (CCS), has been far too slow over the past decade to reach Paris Agreement targets, new research shows.

CCS technology, in which carbon dioxide (CO₂) from power stations and industrial sources, such as cement and steel production, is captured and stored deep underground, is key to preventing emissions from the use of fossil fuels from contributing to climate change.

The study shows that CCS is now ready and available in all of the power generation and industrial sectors that need to be decarbonised, but that the current rate of construction will only deliver 10% of what is required to reach net zero by 2050.

Scientists from the University of Edinburgh, University of Oxford and University of Strathclyde examined the progress of CCS over the past 10 years, finding that CCS technology now exists and operates routinely at industrial scale, safely capturing millions of tonnes CO₂ every year.

The work highlights that CCS is not just a technology for removing the greenhouse gas from coal and gas-fuelled power plants, but can produce low-carbon hydrogen to heat homes, make industrial fertilisers and even capture excess CO₂ from the air to gradually reduce global warming.

The researchers studied all planned CCS projects worldwide, noting a clear commitment to building projects by 2027 but a lack of schemes after this date.

The authors say this is due to an absence of market price or reward for storing CO₂ to benefit the climate and they urge world leaders to address this issue during the ongoing UN COP26 climate talks.

Dr Emma Martin-Roberts (University of Edinburgh), who led the study, said: “It is clear to us that CCS holds immense value in the fight against climate change. But in the past 10 years, government attention has wandered elsewhere. Our work shows all the knowledge and tools are available to start capturing and storing CO₂ immediately.”

Dr Stuart Gilfillan (University of Edinburgh), who co-ordinated the study, said “CCS has always been a rescue team just around the corner. To get the world emissions decreased to anything close to IPCC models of a sustainable future means that CCS needs to come out of hiding in this decade. We need to build working projects at 10-50 times the rate the world has been doing.”

Professor Stuart Haszeldine (University of Edinburgh, SCCS Director), who contributed to the study, said: “This is like planting trees to capture CO₂ but on a much, much, much, bigger scale. The best time to plant a climate tree was 30 years ago. The best time to build a CCS project to permanently store CO₂is right now.”

The research, published in the journal One Earth, was funded by the UKCCSRC and Scottish Carbon Capture & Storage (SCCS).

You can see more on Stuart’s Flexible Funding 2018 project here, and access the paper published in One Earth here (DOI here).

Dr Richard Porter and Dr Ryan (Feng) Wang, both from the Department of Chemical Engineering, University College London, provide an overview of their CCS research project, Optimising methanol production from steel manufacture off gases, funded as part of the UKCCSRC Flexible Funding 2018 programme.

Iron and steel production, with a global output of 1.8 Gt in 2018, is the biggest industrial CO₂ emitter. Despite enormous strides in efficiency improvements to reduce the CO₂ emissions intensity on some steelworks to as low as 1.7 tonnes of CO₂ per tonne of steel, the global average was still 2.6 tonnes of CO₂ per tonne of steel in 2016, with large volume steel production emitting up to 4 tonnes of CO₂ per tonne of steel in some countries. Carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) offers the opportunity to substantially reduce the CO₂ footprint of steelworks, which accounts for between 7 and 9% of direct emissions from the global use of fossil fuel. A variety of CO and CO₂ containing off-gases are present on an integrated steelworks which are usually primarily used to generate heat and power; of these, Blast Furnace Gas (BFG) presents the largest volumetric flow and is hence a prime target for decarbonisation. There is currently huge interest in developing schemes that combine CO₂ capture with conversion of the steelworks off-gases into valuable chemical products.

Global methanol production was around 85 million tonnes in 2016. Methanol is currently primarily sourced from fossil fuel; mostly from natural gas, except in China where it is mainly produced from coal at up to 67 % and from coke oven gas at around 17 %. Global demand for methanol is forecast to increase as the world shifts away from fossil fuel consumption. Methanol production presents an opportunity for CO₂ utilisation on a steelworks where there is sufficient market demand given the diverse range of its applications. A number of challenges remain for developing such schemes though, which include the development of catalysts suited to a non-conventional environment and the design and optimisation of chemical process plant along with the calculation of key performance and techno-economic indicators.

To address the above challenges, we have conducted a systematic experimental campaign along with process simulations to investigate the catalytic reaction kinetics and process economics for optimising methanol production from BFG.

Part of the experimental program has focused on Identical Location (IL) imaging of copper–based methanol synthesis catalysts which have been exposed to relevant conditions where carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide undergo reaction with hydrogen to produce methanol. The IL technique is a non-destructive version of scanning electron microscopy and has been proven as a concept across different time and length scales. The IL technique uncovered the formation of a thin layer around reaction exposed Cu particles had formed as illustrate in figure 1. These layers are believed to be made of zinc oxide and are responsible for the catalyst’s activation in methanol formation reactions. Copper and copper oxide containing nanoparticles were also identified in the catalysts. The copper nanoparticles are spherical with 5 nm diameter, whereas copper oxide nanoparticles have irregular shapes and are slightly bigger. We aim to examine the oxidation states in the catalyst in the near future by using an X-ray nanoprobe.

Figure 1. Identical Location images showing the formation of a thin layer of ZnO around Cu nanoparticles

Investigations were also carried out in a micro-activity reactor for real-time, in-process activity and selectivity measurements of catalysts for methanol production. Two different types of catalyst have been tested; 1) Copper particles supported on Cerium oxide, which were synthesized at UCL’s labs, and, 2) commercial copper-based catalyst. By monitoring the reaction products by using mass spectrometry we were able to identify and measure of different gases (i.e. methanol, methane, formic acid, formaldehyde, ethanol and CO). These results taken over ranges of temperatures and compositions allowed the construction of the Arrhenius rate law diagrams. These investigations highlighted that the copper supported on cerium catalysts have high selectivity towards carbon monoxide and methane formation during CO₂ hydrogenation reaction.

Scaling up from the reaction kinetics, we have performed the conceptual design of BFG-to-methanol process for integration at a steelworks, based on the BFG flow, which ordinarily destined for a combined heat and power plant, being diverted for CCUS. This resulted in the process flow diagram shown in figure 2, based on conditioning the BFG using a number of unit operations, followed by methanol synthesis using the direct CO₂ hydrogenation route. The process simulated using the software Aspen Plus, allowed for the complex calculation of the mass and energy balances along with evaluation of the process economics. On the design basis, the results have shown that diverting around 25% of CO₂ in the process for utilisation would result in a production of ~200,000 tonnes/yr of high purity methanol, which is equivalent to typical commercial scales. Energy balance and cost analysis demonstrated that the compression of BFG and CO₂-syngas are the most energy consuming and costly steps. CCUS processes will play an important role in CO₂ mitigation by capturing and storing CO₂ and using it to make chemical products, thereby displacing the fossil fuels that would have otherwise been used to make them.

Figure 2. Process flow diagram for the BFG-to-methanol process by direct CO₂ hydrogenation.

Find out more about this project and view further outputs here.

As part of the UKCCSRC Flexible Funding programme, Professor Karen Turner, Director of the Centre for Energy Policy, and her team at the University of Strathclyde, looked at the potential role of CCS in achieving Net Zero from a wider economic and just transition perspective.

The Scottish and UK Governments have arguably set in statute the most ambitious (and interdependent) climate change targets of any countries in the world with a commitment of Net Zero emissions by 2045 and 2050 respectively. Our focus in researching this issue at the University of Strathclyde’s Centre for Energy Policy emerges from the fact that transitioning to Net Zero won’t be easy, and taking the leading role in the global effort, even less so. Especially getting on the road now where people, businesses and government have pressing priorities in getting social, economic and societal well-being back on track in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Thus, the need is more urgent than ever to recognise and consider what we need to do in transitioning to Net Zero as a question of how we evolve our economy, our society and our lives. The ‘easier’ side of that is to identify where net economic and lifestyle benefits can emerge and evolve if we plan and do things the right way. The more challenging side is when there may be net costs, for some time, or lasting into the foreseeable future. That really pushes us to consider who pays, how and when.

The challenge has two crucially important and challenging dimensions. First, to recognise that these are challenges that can be overcome, but with this requiring acknowledgement and understanding of a range of very real issues around the economic and societal challenge of transitioning to net zero, and the politics thereof. We need to reset, ask and address the right questions, including developing understanding of the potential economic and social consequences of different actions. We also need to get the right people involved in the conversation and the research that informs it and the way forward.

Secondly, to recognise that achieving a just transition that is fair to all – and ideally reduces inequalities in our society – is crucial if there is to be societal and, therefore, political ‘buy in’. For example, recognising that the justness of the transition – how people’s lives are affected and changed – depends on us understanding and dealing with the fact that industries need to sustain their competitiveness. It’s not just about returns to shareholders, it’s about people’s jobs and livelihoods, not just in those industries but in the extensive network of supply chains they support.

In short, it’s all about prosperity for people. Not least when we in the UK have taken a leading role in committing to and delivering Net Zero.

Understanding the economic opportunities and challenges of industrial decarbonisation

At the Centre for Energy Policy we’ve been engaged in one particular theme of research that focuses on industrial decarbonisation, which is seen as one of the key challenges of getting to Net Zero. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is a technology which could allow essential industries like cement, steel and chemical manufacturing to continue production whilst drastically reducing their emissions. We took a first pass at considering the carbon capture element of CCS from a wider economic and just transition perspective. The key issue for us is understanding the implications of action.

For firms, doing carbon capture means the need to use more equipment – capital – to produce the same output. While returns can be restored by raising prices, when firms are operating in an international market place where competitors are not all doing the same, this can lead to an effective reduction in relative competitiveness. If firms lose competitiveness and demand this will lead to a contraction in sales and therefore activity, not to mention the risk of firms relocating overseas. Generally, if industry contracts there will be a contraction in the UK economy, earnings and tax receipts.

So far, we’ve focussed our applied work on the Scottish Chemicals sector and outcomes for the Scottish economy. In the scenarios we considered, Chemicals industry prices had to rise by between 4% and 8% due to the costs of implementing carbon capture. The consequent loss in competitiveness could trigger a lasting contraction in Scottish GDP of at least £175million per annum. This would take around £40million a year out the public budget and reduce Chemicals industry jobs by 10% or 600 people, with a further 750 jobs at risk in the wider Scottish supply chain.

We also explored an alternative option where government invested via a subsidy sufficient to avoid the competitiveness loss with the aim of protecting jobs and earnings in a region where they may be difficult to replace. But someone needs to pay. We considered the impacts of the costs of the subsidy being fully socialised via income tax. Increased taxation can cause a different type of contraction. People have less money to spend. The overall GDP contraction would be significantly reduced but hit in different parts of the economy: the sectors where households spend their money, and the supporting supply chains. This could actually lead to a higher number of job losses, albeit in lower paid sectors on average.

But the Just Transition requires we protect the lower paid too. So what is the solution? Could other elements of our Net Zero portfolio boost household incomes and spending power, such as ones that reduce the costs of heating our homes and delivering our transport needs? Indeed, could other Net Zero actions generate enough public revenues to remove the need to increase taxation to pay for costly elements of industry decarbonisation? Of course, the need to do so should decline as other nations, and competitors in the international market place, follow our lead.

The key point is that Net Zero is an economic system and societal challenge as much, if not more than an energy system and technology one. We need to join up our thinking, discussions and research on all of these elements if we are to deliver a Just Transition whilst meeting critical climate targets.

The research underlying this blog is supported by the UK Carbon Capture and Storage Centre (UKCCSRC), the Bellona Foundation and the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC). For more details about the research please see our research brief and policy brief.

Karen Turner, Julia Race, Antonios Katris and Jamie Stewart, University of Strathclyde

The UK Carbon Capture and Storage Research Community (UKCCSRC) is supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as part of the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Energy Programme.

Resolving CO2 trapping and tracking CO2 migration (Flexible Funding 2018)

Key results