Congratulations to Kumar Patchigolla and team on a new CO₂ shipping paper!

We’re pleased to share details of the latest technical review paper on large-scale CO₂ shipping and marine emissions management for carbon capture, utilisation, and storage, from a team at Cranfield consisting of Hisham Al Baroudi, Adeola Awoyomi, Kumar Patchigolla, Kranthi Jonnalasadda and EJ Anthony.

The paper is a review of CO₂ transport in the CCUS chain and critically reviews CO₂ shipping in order to explore its techno-economic feasibility in comparison to other transportation options. This review provides an overview of CO₂ shipping for CCUS and scrutinises its potential role for global CO₂ transport, alongside insights into the technological advances in marine carrier CO₂ transportation for CCUS. Key questions addressed are preparations for shipping, relevant transport properties and optimum conditions.

CCUS requires much greater capacities than the shipping of liquefied CO₂ transportation that is most commonly used in the food and brewery industries – so how do we scale that experience up? It seems only limited work is available on the large-scale transportation needs for the marine environment, and, based on the project’s analysis, the optimal transport conditions could be case sensitive and related to project variables. But which is better, shipping or pipelines? This research finds that ship-based transport of CO₂ is a better option to decarbonise dislocated emitters over long distances and for relatively smaller quantities in comparison to offshore pipeline, as pipelines require a continuous flow of compressed gas and have a high cost-dependency on distance. Finally, the project explores the potential environmental footprint of marine chains, with particular reference to the energy implications and emissions from ships and their management. A careful scrutiny of potential future developments highlights the fact, that despite some existing challenges, implementation of CO₂ shipping is crucial to support CCUS both in the UK and worldwide.

You can read ‘A review of large-scale CO₂ shipping and marine emissions management for carbon capture, utilisation and storage’ here.

Well done to all involved, and thanks to Hisham for sharing the success of Kumar’s team with us!