IS CO2 SEQUESTRATION SAFE? DOES THE WORLD KNOW NORWAY’S SECRET?

Problems with CO2 Sequestration in the North Sea; Leakages in the Utsira formation and their consequences for CCS policy
RPR, May 6, 2009
and
Leakages in the Utsira formation and their consequences for CCS policy
May 2008 (Greenpeace)
and
Countries betting tech can clean up coal
John D. Sutter, July 13, 2009 (CNN)

SUMMARY
The dream of “clean” coal continues to seduce otherwise sensible political leaders despite the failure of innovation to lead the so-far inadequate technology out of what insiders have taken to calling the "valley of death."

Yet innovators persist. There is always some new idea that must be tried. The dreamers in the U.S. House of Representatives just this Spring included billions in R&D funding in the energy and climate legislation and dreamers in the Senate are readying a fight to affirm the bill with the “clean” coal R&D billions intact. The Obama administration shares the dream and recently announced it would revive FutureGen, the billion-dollar carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) experiment.

Federal spending for CCS research is expected to go from $3.6 billion in 2009 to $7.2 billion in 2012. For comparison, this year’s entire spending for ALL New Energy and Energy Efficiency is only $14 billion.

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The basic, 2-step idea sounds simple: (1) Capture the greenhouse gas emissions (GhGs) spewed when coal is burned to boil water to drive a turbine to generate electricity (using 1 of 3 processes, gasification, oxyfuel combustion or postcombustion absorption). (2) Transport the captured GhGs to a site where they can be sequestered safely deep underground, either in deep geologic structures or fading oil and natural gas wells.

The criticism of the enormous investment planned for CCS focuses on whether any level of innovation can make it a practical and safe undertaking at an affordable price. Many say the money spent to prove CCS can never be well-spent and could instead be spent on New Energy technology that is available to go to work making emissions-free electricity right now and on Energy Efficiency technology that is available to go to work reducing the use of emissions-spewing energy right now.

Both parts of the CCS process have been done on a small scale but never at the scale of a utility’s operation. The sequestration has been done in fading oil wells for some decades on a random, unscientific basis. Since 1996, CO2 from Norwegian national oil company StatoilHydro’s Sleipner natural gas field has been injected into a deep seabed saline aquifer of the Utsira formation in the North Sea. Things were looking very promising until Spring 2008 when Utsira sprung a leak.

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It raises the question of whether it is possible to safely pump a caustic substance into supposedly permanent storage, whether there are adequate sites to risk doing so and whether it can be done at a cost-effective price. Presently, the cost of pumping CO2 underground is much more than the per-tonne market price of GhGs on international emissions trading markets. In other words, it would be cheaper for companies to pay to build New Energy capacity than to capture and store their spew. And it probably always will be.

StatoilHydro had been pumping a million tonnes of CO2 from Sleipner into a sub-seabed saline aquifer since 1996 when, in Spring 2008, it discovered leaked process-water and called off the operation. The implication was that the geology of the sequestration site was not as secure as had been thought.

Oily North Sea surface water observed from the drilling platform led to the discovery of cracking in the seabed above the subsea aquifer reservoir.

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Adding incompetence to ignorance, it turned out supposedly required monitoring and warning systems were not in place. It is, therefore, not possible to know how long the leaks had been present before they were fortuitously discovered.

Since the shutdown, evidence of other leakage is emerging.

Although it blamed the leaks on the injection well and not the aquifer, a Norwegian Petroleum Directorate study nevertheless changed its description of the Utsira formation from “able to store all European emissions for hundreds of years” to “not very suitable.”

It is crucial to stress that this is the best that can be hoped for in the way of safe sequestration. The Sleipner injections into the Utsira formation have been hailed for years by EU and IEA “clean” coal believers and in scientific, academic and fossil fuel industry journals as THE proof secure sequestration is possible.

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COMMENTARY
Experts agree CCS is not “the silver bullet” that will bring down global climate change but nobody can seem to find a way to give up on it. There seems to be some kind of need to believe it is possible.

The safety of CO2 sequestration, for instance, only becomes relevant if the coal industry successfully finds a way to capture emissions in a cost-effective way, transform them into a transportable form in an affordable manner and deliver them to the sites deemed safe for sequestration.

The seduction of the dream is understandable. Coal supplies half of U.S. power generation and accounts for 80% of the GhGs created to produce electricity. Although emissions-free, New Energy presently provides only 2% of U.S. electricity and the “clean” coal dreamers can’t seem to (or don't want to) wrap their imaginations around the possibility of ramping New Energy up.

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Coal is also thought to be abundant and cheap. In fact, the coal that is recoverable at affordable rates is likely not nearly so abundant as optimistic industry hype suggests. Yeomanly studies by Leslie Glustrom and David Rutledge suggest coal supplies could peak in the foreseeable future.

The Obama administration has repeatedly promised the coal industry it would get plenty of federal money for “clean” coal research and development. One of the ways it appears set on fulfilling these promises is to fund FutureGen. Abandoned by the previous administration’s Energy Department, FutureGen was a planned CCS-equipped utility-scale power plant that was to have been funded by a public-private arrangement. When proposed costs kept rising in 2007 and early 2008, DOE pulled its support.

The corporate entities involved in FutureGen considered carrying it forward on their own until they looked carefully at the costs and the feasibility. When the current administration announced in June it would resume funding for FutureGen, the wised-up private sector would-be partners like American Electric Power Co. and Southern Co. announced they were unwilling to buy in. The project continues to go by the nickname of "NeverGen."

Some interests argue that the U.S. must move ahead with FutureGen and CCS R&D or it will fall behind the rest of the world and miss out on the huge economic opportunity practical, cost-effective CCS technology could be in emerging economies' coal-dependent markets. China is developing a GreenGen plant, Australia is planning ZeroGen and the EU will use revenues from its emissions allowances auction to fund CCS pilot projects.

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Those who understand the strengths and weaknesses of CCS, though, say 2 things about the international race to build and prove it: (1) Any nation that wants to charge ahead on its own is no threat because the costs will make their effort too burdensome or too slow. (2) There is a marked willingness everywhere for international cooperation on CCS R&D and the sharing of the concomitant costs. The U.S. has more to gain in benefit and international good will by awaiting cooperative opportunities and leaping to join them.

Footnote: What is possibly the most troubling aspect of the shutdown at Sleipner is that it is not known how long the leak, or leaks, had been ongoing and what other yet-to-be discovered or yet-to-be leaks there might still be.

As the Greenpeace report on the Utsira leaks points out, to use CCS as a solution to global climate change is, in essence, just another way of passing the problem of fossil fuel spew on to future generations. The only way to avoid doing that is to stop the spew by transitioning to New Energy and Energy Efficiency.

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QUOTES
- Sarah Forbes, senior associate, World Resources Institute: "If we're going to be able to add carbon capture and storage to our toolbox of ways to address climate change, the time to demonstrate it is right now -- or yesterday, maybe…CO2 emissions are continuing to rise, and we're seeing impacts of climate change…I feel like we should build it to show that CCS is possible and attainable…I worry that we may be fostering a history of planning these showcase projects and never building them, and I think that's a waste of resources…"
- Forbes, senior associate, World Resources Institute: " …To some extent, I can see why it's described as a race…but on the other hand, I think that [with] climate change, we're at a point where we need to work together."
- Kelly Sims Gallagher, director of energy technology innovation policy, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs/Harvard: "I don't think that there's any silver bullet…I think we're going to need to do a little bit of everything as fast as we can in order to adequately address the climate change threat."

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- Scott Anderson, senior policy adviser, Environmental Defense Fund: "We're not champions of coal at EDF, but we're realists…Although we see room for a huge expansion of renewable energy and efficiency, in the near term, we don't think that coal is going away. ... We still have a huge existing base of coal plants that will be around, at a minimum, for a number of decades."
- Daniel Kessler, spokesman, Greenpeace: "CCS is a scam…It's being used as a promise to the American people that we can keep burning coal, the world's dirtiest fuel, in perpetuity."
- Gisle Johansen, spokesperson, StatoilHydr: “The problem is the injection well. […] It's probably located in the wrong place of the formation…”
- Greenpeace report on the Utsira leak: “The Tordis leakage illustrates StatoilHydro's practice of making invalid assumptions and operating a site without proper monitoring. But most importantly, it proves how difficult it is to inject and store anything in underground reservoirs, even in the Utsira formation which is considered to be one of the best studied geological formations on Earth.”
- Greenpeace report: “The leakages from Tordis, Visund and Ringhorne all occurred in the Utsira formation, the same geological structure where the Sleipner field is located. The CO2 storage project at Sleipner has been used by the Norwegian government, as well as the EU, IEA and numerous others, as proof that CO2 can be safely and permanently stored. For years now, the Utsira formation has been heralded in scientific journals, by industry, NGOs and the media as a geological structure that can store ‘endless amounts’ of CO2…”