Carbon capture and storage (CCS) (or carbon capture and sequestration or carbon control

and sequestration ) is the process of capturing waste carbon dioxide (CO ) from large point
[1]
2

sources, such as fossil fuel power plants, transporting it to a storage site, and depositing it where
it will not enter the atmosphere, normally an underground geological formation. The aim is to
prevent the release of large quantities of CO into the atmosphere (from fossil fuel use in power
2

generation and other industries). It is a potential means of mitigating the contribution of fossil fuel
emissions to global warming and ocean acidification. Although CO has been injected into
[2] [3]
2

geological formations for several decades for various purposes, including enhanced oil recovery,
the long term storage of CO is a relatively new concept. The first commercial example was the
2

Weyburn-Midale Carbon Dioxide Project in 2000. Another example is SaskPower's Boundary

[4]

Dam. 'CCS' can also be used to describe the scrubbing of CO from ambient air as a climate
2

engineering technique.

An integrated pilot-scale CCS power plant was to begin operating in September 2008 in the
eastern German power plant Schwarze Pumpe run by utility Vattenfall, to test the technological
feasibility and economic efficiency. CCS applied to a modern conventional power plant could
reduce CO emissions to the atmosphere by approximately 80–90% compared to a plant without
2

CCS. The IPCC estimates that the economic potential of CCS could be between 10% and 55%
[5]

of the total carbon mitigation effort until year 2100. [5]

Carbon dioxide can be captured out of air or fossil fuel power plant flue gas using adsorption (or
carbon scrubbing), membrane gas separation, or adsorption technologies. Amines are the
leading carbon scrubbing technology. Capturing and compressing CO may increase the energy
2

needs of a coal-fired CCS plant by 25–40%. These and other system costs are estimated to
[5]

increase the cost per watt-hour energy produced by 21–91% for fossil fuel power plants. [5]

Applying the technology to existing plants would be more expensive, especially if they are far
from a sequestration site. A 2005 industry report suggests that with successful research,
development and deployment (RD&D), sequestered coal-based electricity generation in 2025
may cost less than unsequestered coal-based electricity generation today. [6]

Storage of the CO is envisaged either in deep geological formations, or in the form of mineral
2

carbonates. Deep ocean storage is not currently considered feasible due to the associated effect
of ocean acidification. Geological formations are currently considered the most promising
[7]

sequestration sites. The National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) reported that North
America has enough storage capacity for more than 900 years worth of carbon dioxide at current
production rates. A general problem is that long term predictions about submarine or
[8]

underground storage security are very difficult and uncertain, and there is still the risk that CO 2

might leak into the atmosphere. [9]

CSS is closely related to pyrogenic carbon capture and storage (PyCCS). [10]
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is a technology that can capture up to 90% of the carbon dioxide
(CO2) emissions produced from the use of fossil fuels in electricity generation and industrial
processes, preventing the carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere.
Furthermore, the use of CCS with renewable biomass is one of the few carbon abatement technolo-
gies that can be used in a 'carbon-negative' mode – actually taking carbon dioxide out of the
atmosphere.

The CCS chain consists of three parts; capturing the carbon dioxide, transporting the carbon dioxide,
and securely storing the carbon dioxide emissions, underground in depleted oil and gas fields or deep
saline aquifer formations.
First, capture technologies allow the separation of carbon dioxide from gases produced in electricity
generation and industrial processes by one of three methods: pre-combustion capture, post-
combustion capture and oxyfuel combustion.
Carbon dioxide is then transported by pipeline or by ship for safe storage. Millions of tonnes of carbon
dioxide are already transported annually for commercial purposes by road tanker, ship and pipelines.
The U.S. has four decades of experience of transporting carbon dioxide by pipeline for enhanced oil
recovery projects.
The carbon dioxide is then stored in carefully selected geological rock formation that are typically
located several kilometres below the earth's surface.
At every point in the CCS chain, from production to storage, industry has at its disposal a number of
process technologies that are well understood and have excellent health and safety records. The
commercial deployment of CCS will involve the widespread adoption of these CCS techniques,
combined with robust monitoring techniques and Government regulation.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a range of technologies that hold the promise of
trapping up to 90% of the carbon dioxide emissions from power stations and industrial
sites. It involves collecting, transporting and then burying the CO2 so that it does not
escape into the atmosphere and contribute to climate change.

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There are three main techniques: the post-combustion process involves scrubbing the
power plant's exhaust gas using chemicals. Pre-combustion CCS takes place before
the fuel is placed in the furnace by first converting coal into a clean-burning gas and
stripping out the CO2 released by the process. The third method, oxyfuel, burns the
coal in an atmosphere with a higher concentration of pure oxygen, resulting in an
exhaust gas that is almost pure CO2. (See below for further details).

Once the CO2 has been trapped, it is liquefied, transported – sometimes for several
hundred miles – and buried, either in suitable geological formations, deep
underground saline aquifers or disused oil fields. The last method is often used in a
process called "enhanced oil recovery", where CO2 is pumped into an oil field to force
out the remaining pockets of oil that would otherwise prove difficult to extract.
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The technology is not cheap – up to 40% of a power station's energy could end up
being used to run the CCS scrubbing and transport systems and experts estimate the
average cost of retro-fitting Britain's aged power stations at about £1bn each. Pipes to
transport the CO2 to suitable burial sites could cost £1m per mile. The oldest power
stations may end up being uneconomical to refit.

All the components of CCS have been in use by oil companies and chemical
engineering plants for decades. But, so far, only a small pilot project at Vatenfall's
Schwarze Pumpe power station in northern Germany has connected all the different
stages of the CCS chain together. The pilot is an oxyfuel boiler that can generate
30MW of heat and around 12MW of electricity.

Trapping methods
Post-combustion
In the post-combustion method, CO2 is separated from the flue gas of the power
station by bubbling the gas through an absorber column packed with liquid solvents
(such as ammonia) that preferentially take out the CO2. In the most commonly-used
techniques, once the chemicals in the absorber column become saturated, a stream of
superheated steam at around 120C is passed through it. This releases the trapped CO2,
which can then be transported for storage elsewhere.

More experimental techniques to scrub CO2 from flue gas without the two-step
process include using seawater to absorb the gas and then returning the mixture back
to the ocean for long-term storage. But, so far, these methods have proved less
efficient and reliable.

Oxyfuel
When coal, oil or natural gas is burned in normal air, the amount of CO2 produced is
between 3-15% of the waste gases, depending on the conditions. Separating the
greenhouse gas out after combustion requires energy so an alternative CCS method is
to burn the fossil fuel in an atmosphere of pure oxygen. In this environment, virtually
all the waste gas will be composed CO2 and water vapour. The latter can be
condensed out while the former can be piped or transported directly to a storage
facility.

In the oxyfuel system, the air fed into the boiler has to be separated into liquid oxygen,
gaseous nitrogen, argon and other trace gases and this process can use up to 15% of
the power produced at the station.

Pre-combustion
This method is normally applied to coal-gasification combined cycle power plants.
The coal is gasified to produce a synthetic gas made from carbon monoxide and
hydrogen. The former is reacted with water to produce CO2, which is captured, and
more hydrogen. The hydrogen can be diverted to a turbine where it can be burned to
produce electricity. Alternatively, some of this gas can be bled off to feed hydrogen
fuel cells for cars.

One disadvantage of the pre-combustion method is that it cannot be retro-fitted to the

older pulversised coal power plants that make up much of the world's installed base of
fossil fuel power. It could perhaps be used in natural gas stations, where a synthetic
gas is first produced by reacting the methane with steam to produce carbon dioxide
and hydrogen. But the economic advantage of this method over post-combustion is yet
to be proven.

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Deployment of carbon capture and storage (CSS) technology is "not optional" if the

world hopes to meet the targets set out in the Paris climate agreement, the

International Energy Agency said recently.

"IEA scenario analysis has consistently highlighted that CCS will be important in

limiting future temperature increases to two degrees Celsius, and we anticipate that

this role for CCS will become increasingly significant if we are to move towards well

below two degrees Celsius,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol wrote in the foreword

to 20 Years of Carbon Capture and Storage: Accelerating Future Deployment.

Canada has three large-scale CCS projects in commercial operation, including

SaskPower’s CCS facility at the Boundary Dam Power Station near Estevan, Sask.,

the Weyburn-Midale enhanced oil recovery projects operated by Cenovus Energy and

Apache Canada, and the Shell Quest project at the Scotford oilsands upgrader near

Edmonton.

While CCS operators in Canada and globally work to improve existing technologies,

in laboratories around the world, scientists are working on the next wave of

technologies. Here is a look at several of them.

Check out the latest Oilweek now for insight into Canada's oilpatch people,
technology and trends.
Read Oilweek now

1. Metal-organic frameworks

In recent years, a class of highly absorbent, nanoporous materials called metal-organic

frameworks (MOFs) have emerged as a promising material for carbon capture in

power plants.

“People are really excited about these materials because we can make a huge variety

and really tune them,” says Northwestern University’s Randall Snurr. “But there’s a

flip side to that. If you have an application in mind, there are thousands of existing

MOFs and millions of potential MOFs you could make. How do you find the best one

for a given application?”

Snurr and his group have discovered a way to rapidly identify top candidates for

carbon capture—using just one per cent of the computational effort that was
previously required. By applying a genetic algorithm, they rapidly searched through a

database of 55,000 MOFs.

One of the identified top candidates, a variant of NOTT-101, has a higher capacity for

CO2 than any MOF reported in scientific literature for the relevant conditions.

“The percentage of carbon dioxide that the MOF can absorb depends on the process,”

Snurr says. “The [United States] Department of Energy target is to remove 90 per cent

of carbon dioxide from a power plant; it’s likely that a process using this material

could meet that target.”

With their nanoscopic pores and incredibly high surface areas, MOFs are excellent

materials for gas storage. MOFs’ vast internal surface areas allow them to hold

remarkably high volumes of gas. The volume of some MOF crystals might be the size

of a grain of salt, for example, but the internal surface area, if unfolded, could cover

an entire football field.

Snurr’s previous work has explored how to use MOFs to capture carbon from existing

power plants during the post-combustion process. About 10–15 per cent of power

plant exhaust is CO2; the rest is mainly nitrogen and water vapor. Snurr and his team

have designed a MOF that can sort these gases to capture CO2 before it enters the

atmosphere. Chemically processing the fuel before it enters the power plant can turn it

into CO2 and hydrogen. After the MOF captures the CO2, the hydrogen is burned,

and the only byproduct is water. This extra chemical processing step would need to be

built into new power plants as a pre-combustion process.

“In places like China, where they are still building a lot of power plants,” Snurr says,

“this would make a lot of sense.”

2. Nanosponges

Cornell University materials scientists have invented low-toxicity, highly effective

carbon-trapping “sponges” that could improve carbon capture economics.

A research team led by Emmanuel Giannelis has invented a powder that performs as

well as or better than industry benchmarks for carbon capture.

The most common carbon capture method today is called amine scrubbing, in which

post-combustion, CO2-containing flue gas passes through liquid vats of amino

compounds, or amines, which absorb most of the CO2. The carbon-rich gas is then

pumped away—sequestered—or reused. The amine solution is extremely corrosive

and requires capital-intensive containment.

The researchers have been working on a better, safer carbon-capture method since

about 2008, and they have gone through several iterations. Their latest consists of a

silica scaffold, the sorbent support, with nanoscale pores for maximum surface area.

They dip the scaffold into liquid amine, which soaks into the support like a sponge

and partially hardens. The finished product is a stable, dry white powder that captures

CO2 even in the presence of moisture.

Solid amine sorbents are used in carbon capture, Giannelis says, but the supports are

usually only physically impregnated with the amines. Over time, some of the amine is

lost, decreasing effectiveness and increasing cost.

The researchers instead grew their amine onto the sorbent surface, which causes the

amine to chemically bond to the sorbents, meaning very little amine loss over time.
3. Hybrid membranes

A new, highly permeable carbon capture membrane developed by scientists at the

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) could lead to more efficient

ways of separating CO2 from power plant exhaust.

The researchers focused on a hybrid membrane that is part polymer and part MOF.

In a first, the scientists engineered the membrane so that CO2 molecules can travel

through it via two distinct channels. Molecules can travel through the polymer

component of the membrane, like they do in conventional gas-separation membranes,

or they can flow through “CO2 highways” created by adjacent MOFs.

Initial tests show this two-route approach makes the hybrid membrane eight times

more CO2-permeable than membranes composed only of the polymer. Boosting CO2

permeability is a big goal in efforts to develop carbon capture materials that are

energy efficient and cost competitive.

“In our membrane, some CO2 molecules get an express ride through the highways

formed by metal-organic frameworks, while others take the polymer pathway. This

new approach will enable the design of higher performing gas separation membranes,”

says Norman Su, a graduate student in the chemical and biomolecular engineering

department at the University of California, Berkeley and a user at the Molecular

Foundry.

Berkeley Lab scientists have developed a hybrid membrane where MOFs account for

50 per cent of its weight, which is about 20 per cent more than other hybrid
membranes. Previously, the mechanical stability of a hybrid membrane limited the

amount of MOFs that could be packed in it.

“But we got our membrane to 50 weight per cent without compromising its structural

integrity,” says Su.

And 50 weight per cent appears to be the magic number. At that threshold, there are so

many MOFs in the membrane that they form a continuous network of highways

through the membrane. When that happens, the hybrid membrane switches from

having a single channel to transport CO2, in which the molecules must go through the

polymer, to two channels, in which the molecules can either move through the

polymer or through the MOFs.

“This is the first hybrid polymer-MOF membrane to have these dual transport

pathways, and it could be a big step toward more competitive carbon capture

processes,” says Su.

4. Crystals

Swedish scientists have created crystals that capture CO2 much more efficiently than

previously known materials, even in the presence of water.

One way to mitigate climate change could be to capture CO2 from the air. So far, this

has been difficult since the presence of water prevents the adsorption of CO2.

Complete dehydration is a costly process. Scientists have now created a stable and

recyclable material where the micro-pores within the crystal have different adsorption

sites for CO2 and water.

“As far as I know, this is the first material that captures CO2 in an efficient way in the

presence of humidity. In other cases, there is competition between water and CO2, and

water usually wins. This material adsorbs both, but the CO2 uptake is enormous,” says

Osamu Terasaki, a professor in the department of materials and environmental

chemistry at Stockholm University.

The new material is called SGU-29, named after Sogang University in South Korea,

and is the result of international cooperation. It is a copper silicate crystal. The

material could be used for capturing CO2 from the atmosphere and especially to clean

emissions.

“CO2 is always produced with moisture, and now we can capture CO2 from humid

gases. Combined with other systems that are being developed, the waste carbon can be

used for new valuable compounds. People are working very hard, and I think we will

be able to do this within five years. The most difficult part is to capture CO2, and we

have a solution for that now,” says Terasaki.

5. Turning carbon to rock

An international team of scientists report they may have found a potentially permanent

way to remove CO2 emissions from the atmosphere—turn it into rock.

The study, published in Science, has shown for the first time that CO2 can be

permanently and rapidly locked away from the atmosphere by injecting it into

volcanic bedrock. The CO2 reacts with the surrounding rock, forming

environmentally benign minerals.

Until now, it was thought that this process would take several hundreds or thousands

of years and is therefore not a practical option. But the current study—led by

Columbia University, the University of Iceland, the University of Toulouse and

Reykjavik Energy—has demonstrated that it can take as little as two years.

Juerg Matter, the lead author and associate professor in geoengineering at the

University of Southampton, says: “Our results show that between 95 and 98 per cent

of the injected CO2 was mineralized over the period of less than two years, which is

amazingly fast.”

The gas was injected into a deep well at the study site in Iceland. As a volcanic island,

Iceland is made up of 90 per cent basalt, a rock rich in elements required for carbon

mineralization, such as calcium, magnesium and iron. The CO2 is dissolved in water

and carried down the well. On contact with the target storage rocks at 400–800 metres

under the ground, the solution quickly reacts with the surrounding basaltic rock,

forming carbonate minerals.

“Carbonate minerals do not leak out of the ground, thus our newly developed method

results in permanent and environmentally friendly storage of CO2 emissions,” says

Matter, who is also a member of the University’s Southampton Marine and Maritime

Institute and an adjunct senior research scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

at Columbia. “On the other hand, basalt is one of the most common rock type on

Earth, potentially providing one of the largest CO2 storage capacity.

“The overall scale of our study was relatively small. So, the obvious next step for

CarbFix is to upscale CO2 storage in basalt. This is currently happening at Reykjavik

Energy’s Hellisheiđi geothermal power plant, where up to 5,000 tonnes of CO2 per

year are captured and stored in a basaltic reservoir."

The investigation is part of the CarbFix project, a European Commission– and

Department of Energy–funded program to develop ways to store anthropogenic CO2

in basaltic rocks through field, laboratory and modelling studies.

6. Turning carbon into fuel

They’re making fuel from thin air at the University of Southern California’s Loker

Hydrocarbon Research Institute.

For the first time, researchers there have directly converted CO2 from the air into

methanol at relatively low temperatures.

The work—led by G.K. Surya Prakash and George Olah from the chemistry

department at USC Dornsife—is part of a broader effort to stabilize the amount of

CO2 in the atmosphere by using renewable energy to transform the greenhouse gas
into its combustible cousin, attacking global warming from two angles

simultaneously. Methanol is a clean-burning fuel for internal combustion engines, a

fuel for fuel cells and a raw material used to produce many petrochemical products.

“We need to learn to manage carbon. That is the future,” says Prakash, the director of

the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute.

The researchers bubbled air through an aqueous solution of pentaethylenehexamine,

adding a catalyst to encourage hydrogen to latch onto the CO2 under pressure. They
then heated the solution, converting 79 per cent of the CO2 into methanol. Though

mixed with water, the resulting methanol can be easily distilled, Prakash says.

The new process was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Prakash and Olah hope to refine the process to the point that it could be scaled up for

industrial use, though that may be five to 10 years away.

“Of course it won’t compete with oil today, at around $30/bbl,” Prakash says, “but

right now we burn fossilized sunshine. We will run out of oil and gas, but the sun will

be there for another five billion years. So we need to be better at taking advantage of it

as a resource.”

Despite its outsized impact on the environment, the actual concentration of CO2 in the

atmosphere is relatively small—roughly 400 parts per million or 0.04 per cent of the

total volume, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric

Administration. (For a comparison, there’s more than 23 times as much argon in the

atmosphere, which still makes up less than one per cent of the total volume.)

Previous efforts have required a slower multistage process with the use of high

temperatures and high concentrations of CO2, meaning that renewable energy sources

would not be able to efficiently power the process, as Olah and Prakash hope.

The new system operates at around 125–165 degrees Celsius, minimizing the

decomposition of the catalyst, which occurs at 155 degrees Celsius. It also uses a

homogeneous catalyst, making it a quicker “one-pot” process. In a lab, the researchers

demonstrated that they were able to run the process five times with only minimal loss

of the effectiveness of the catalyst.

7. Turning carbon into fibres

Finding a technology to shift CO2 from a climate change problem to a valuable

commodity has long been a dream of many scientists and government officials. Now,

a team of chemists says they have developed a technology to economically convert

atmospheric CO2 directly into highly valued carbon nanofibres for industrial and

consumer products.

“We have found a way to use atmospheric CO2 to produce high-yield carbon

nanofibres,” says Stuart Licht, who leads a research team at George Washington

University. “Such nanofibres are used to make strong carbon composites, such as

those used in the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, as well as in high-end sports equipment,

wind turbine blades and a host of other products.”

Previously, the researchers had made fertilizer and cement without emitting CO2,

which they reported. Now, the team says their research could shift CO2 from a global-

warming problem to a feedstock for the manufacturing of in-demand carbon

nanofibres.

Licht calls his approach “diamonds from the sky.” That refers to carbon being the

material that diamonds are made of and also hints at the high value of the products,

such as the carbon nanofibres, that can be made from atmospheric carbon and oxygen.

Because of its efficiency, this low-energy process can be run using only a few volts of

electricity, sunlight and a whole lot of CO2. At its root, the system uses electrolytic

syntheses to make the nanofibres. CO2 is broken down in a high-temperature

electrolytic bath of molten carbonates at 750 degrees Celsius. Atmospheric air is

added to an electrolytic cell. Once there, the CO2 dissolves when subjected to the heat
and direct current through electrodes of nickel and steel. The carbon nanofibres build

up on the steel electrode, where they can be removed, Licht says.

To power the syntheses, heat and electricity are produced through an extremely

efficient hybrid solar-energy system. The system focuses the sun’s rays on a

photovoltaic solar cell to generate electricity and on a second system to generate heat

and thermal energy, which raises the temperature of the electrolytic cell.

Licht estimates electrical energy costs of this “solar thermal electrochemical process”

to be around $1,000/ton of carbon nanofibre product, which means the cost of running

the system is hundreds of times less than the value of product output.

“We calculate that, with a physical area less than 10 per cent the size of the Sahara

Desert, our process could remove enough CO2 to decrease atmospheric levels to those

of the pre-industrial revolution within 10 years,” he says.

At this time, the system is experimental, and Licht’s biggest challenge will be to ramp

up the process and gain experience to make consistently sized nanofibres. “We are

scaling up quickly,” he adds, “and soon should be in range of making tens of grams of

nanofibres an hour.”

Licht explains that one advance the group has recently achieved is the ability to

synthesize carbon fibres using even less energy than when the process was initially

developed. “Carbon nanofibre growth can occur at less than one volt at 750 degrees

Celsius, which for example, is much less than the three to five volts used in the 1,000-

degree-Celsius industrial formation of aluminum," he says.