Scotland eyes carbon-capture for North Sea

Scotland-based companies and the government at Holyrood hope proximity to the rapidly-depleting oil and gas fields of the North Sea will put the country at the forefront of a potentially lucrative new industry – storing carbon dioxide.

The UK government believes carbon capture and storage (CCS) is essential for curbing greenhouse gas emissions and it plans to back up to four “clean coal” power stations using the technology, which is still being developed.

By this process, the CO2 will be removed, compressed, then piped to be stored in underground reservoirs – such as old oilfields.

The potential value of the global market for carbon abatement technology will be between £2bn to £4bn by 2030, according to an independent study released recently by the Department for Energy and Climate Change.

ScottishPower announced last week that Shell and National Grid were to join its CCS consortium, which recently switched on a prototype carbon-capture test unit at Longannet power station in Fife – the first time anywhere in the UK that carbon capture technology has been put to work on a coal-fired power station.

Ignacio Galán, chairman of Iberdrola, the Spanish energy group that owns ScottishPower, reckons the UK could lead the world with CCS technology, which can cut emissions of carbon dioxide by coal-fired power stations by up to 90 per cent.

“There is the potential to [form] an industry on the same scale as North Sea oil – and we will invest in Scotland and the UK to help realise this potential,” he said.

Nick Horler, chief executive of ScottishPower, said: “Shell’s experience of working offshore in the North Sea is clearly critical – not only in terms of the potential for CO2 storage in depleted oil and gas reservoirs, but because transport and storage of CO2 will demand many of the same engineering and subsurface skills on which the oil and gas industry has depended for many decades.”

Chris Train, National Grid’s director for network operations, said his group’s expertise in high pressure gas pipelines made it the natural partner in CCS projects.

“The Longannet project also presents a potential opportunity to reuse some of our existing natural gas transmission pipelines in Scotland for carbon dioxide transportation as North Sea gas supplies decline, helping the scheme to a running start,” he said.

On the other side of Scotland, Renfrew-based Doosan Babcock last month opened a test facility to demonstrate its clean combustion technology on a full-size 40MW burner. Its OxyCoal system is a process by which coal is burned in an atmosphere of oxygen and recycled flue gas to give an output of concentrated carbon dioxide that can be piped away and injected into underground stores.

Doosan Babcock specialises in making advanced boilers for the power industry, and the project’s prime sponsor is Scottish and Southern Energy.

The facility was opened by Joan Ruddock, energy minister, who said cleaning up coal power was essential if the UK was to meet its climate change goals while keeping the lights on.

“The development of CCS offers high-quality jobs and export opportunities for the UK which is why we’re supporting this OxyCoal project with £2.2m of funding,” she said.

“Our proposals on coal are some of the most radical in the world and will help ensure the UK leads the way on CCS.”

Iain Miller, chief executive of Doosan Babcock, said that with his group’s portfolio now including pre-combustion, OxyCoal and post-combustion technologies, it would be ready to deliver low-emission power technology to its customers worldwide as fast as the market for these products became available.

Ian Marchant, chief executive of Scottish and Southern Energy, said the government’s recently announced Low Carbon Transition Plan set a great deal of store by the successful deployment of CCS technology.

“The pace of progress in recent years has been disappointing – but I hope renewed impetus from government allied to the type of co-operation evident in the OxyCoal project will bring us closer to the ultimate goal of successful deployment of large-scale carbon capture and storage technology here in the UK and elsewhere,” he said.

The Holyrood government has published a joint industrial and academic study that found all the carbon dioxide produced by UK coal-fired plants during the next 200 years could be stored under the Scottish area of the North Sea.

Alex Salmond, first minister, said: “The potential Scottish capacity is of European significance, comparable with that of offshore Norway, and greater than the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany combined.”

But the Scottish National party leader said the benefits of carbon capture could go far beyond the environment.

“Electricity generated in Scottish power stations which are fitted with carbon capture technology will be comparable in price to energy generation using other low-carbon technology,” he said.

“The development of CCS in Scotland – including power stations and storage networks – has the potential to support 10,000 jobs.”