A Portfolio of Commercial-Scale Carbon-Capture-and-Storage Demonstration Projects

Abstract

This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights of paper IPTC 18469, “A Portfolio of Commercial-Scale CCS Demonstration Projects,” by W. Maas, M. de Nier, T. Wiwchar, and B. Spence, Shell, prepared for the 2015 International Petroleum Technology Conference, Doha, Qatar, 7–9 December. The paper has not been peer reviewed. A major oil company is progressing a portfolio of commercial-scale carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS) demonstration projects covering an array of technologies that target applications of relevance to the wider oil and gas industry. A number of key learnings have been obtained on the technology-deployment and the critical-project- development aspects of the different project phases. This paper provides an overview of these learnings, with a specific focus on the issues faced by CCS-project developers. Introduction Over the last decade, the company, with its partners, has been helping to advance CCS through a series of CCS demonstration projects. The operator’s CCS commercial and project portfolio includes The Quest project, which is the first CCS project of commercial scale in the heavy-oil industry The Peterhead CCS project, which, if realized, could be the world’s first commercial-scale, full-chain project to demonstrate the feasibility of CCS at a gas-fired power station This paper explores in detail the Quest project and the Peterhead project, the latter being currently in the front-end engineering and design phase. The Peterhead CCS Project The company and a UK power provider are developing the Peterhead CCS Project (Fig. 1). The scope of the project includes Operation of an existing gas turbine (GT 13) at the Peterhead Power Station in Aberdeenshire, Scotland A new steam turbine dedicated to low-pressure steam generation Capture of approximately 1 million t/a of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, for a period of 10 to 15 years, from the flue gas in a large concrete absorber tower using the operator’s amine-capture technology Regeneration of the amine in a tower using steam from the power plant Compression and conditioning (oxygen and water removal) of the CO2 Transport of the dense-phase CO2 by an offshore pipeline approximately 100 km in length Injection of the CO2 with the adapted Goldeneye platform and wells Storage in the depleted Goldeneye gas reservoir at a depth of more than 2 km under the floor of the North Sea The objective is that the power plant, combined with the CCS chain, will operate as one integrated low-carbon power-supply chain.