CCS: Will the U.K. ever capture the moment?

In this month's issue of Professional Engineering (the publication of the IMechE), there's an interesting overview of the U.K's stalling plans towards Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS). In 2007, the Department Of Energy & Climate Change (DECC) launched a competition to build the U.K.'s first demonstration CCS plant, a competition that, as various entrants pulled out in the midst of the economic crisis, was won by default as much as merit by Longannet in Fife. That came to an underwhelming, if predictable end last October, as it was announced that the scheme would be scrapped, under crippling financial concerns primarily over the cost of piping required to transport the captured CO2 to the North Sea.

It is immensely frustrating when you consider that the U.K. has so much in place to become global leaders in CCS. On the geological side, there's the extensive experience of oil and gas drilling in the North Sea. In terms of technical knowledge, the U.K. has, in the likes of Cambridge and Imperial, some of the key academic institutions looking into both the array of capture technologies and the modelling of geological storage. And whilst CO2 is more corrosive than natural gas, the U.K.'s existing gas pipe network means that the infrastructure is, at least in part, in place.

Plants such as Longannet also provide a part of that infrastructure; the most developed capture technologies, such as solvent-based capture, are predominantly post-combustion, which means that they are retrofittable to existing plants. This introduces a significant efficiency penalty to the plant (somewhere around a third of the standalone plant's thermal efficiency is typical), but steadily-advancing technologies such as Chemical Looping Combustion, whereby the use of metal oxides to provide oxygen for combustion makes CO2 separation an inherent part of the process, may eliminate such penalties for future new-builds.

There is light at the end of the tunnel. Last December saw the £21 million CO2 capture installation at Ferrybridge power station in West Yorkshire go online. This post-combustion project works by capturing the CO2 from the flue gas in an absorbing column using solvents before heat-assisted regeneration of the sorbent, and the resultant release of the captured CO2. A joint project between SSE, Doosan Power Systems and Vattenfall, the demonstration plant captures 100 tonnes of CO2 per day, equivalent to 5MW of the plant's 2000MW capactiy; there's no storage of CO2 at this stage, but the project will provide extremely valuable insight into the handling of hot flue gases which will inform potential future CCS projects, such as that in Peterhead jointly helmed by SSE and Shell, which may come into operation as early as 2016.

Whether the capture technology is post-, pre- or oxy-fuel combustion, retrofit or new-build, the costs of CCS are substantial. But with the relative readiness of the technology, and its ability to integrate readily with existing infrastructure, it's hard to imagine, new nuclear builds aside perhaps, another technology that can readily take such a big chunk out of the U.K.'s CO2 emissions than CCS.