A couple of Institute staff, Chris Short (chief economist) and Andrew Roden (head of project analysis & development), recently presented the findings of the Institute's 2010 Global Status of CCS Report at a number of breakfast events throughout Australia.
The events were hosted by AECOM in Brisbane and Parsons Brinckerhoff in Sydney and Melbourne, in early and mid June.
6. CCS Policy Frameworks Accelerating innovation and CCS development: demonstrate safe, secure, long term storage of CO2 understanding and improving large scale cost and performance increasing R&D activities Accelerate the sharing of lessons learnt Identifying viable geological storage areas Developing legal and regulatory frameworks Improving public awareness and consultation
17. Is CCS POLICY on track? It’s not just about prices The size of the market matters for innovation Relatively low patent activity in most low carbon technologies technologies
The IPCC in its 2005 CCS Special Report made high-level, global CO2 storage capacity estimates ranging from 1,700-11,000Gt of CO2 for a variety of storage types, with deep saline formation storage making up the vast majority (Metz et al. 2005). The IPCC concluded that there was sufficient capacity at a global level to meet the goal of storing a total of 145Gt of CO2 from emissions by 2050.In 2009, the IEA reconfirmed the target of 145Gt of CO2 when it presented its Technology Roadmap for CCS. It proposed a deployment growth in which 100 projects would store more than 100 million tonnes per year by 2020 and more than 3,000 projects would store around 10Gt of CO2 per year by 2050 (IEA 2009). The Technology Roadmap did not attempt to match projected emission rates to storage requirements.Figure 37 provides an interim update of the international IPCC 2005 assessment of global geological potential ‘suitability’ for storage prepared for the Global CCS Institute by the IEAGHG R&D Programme and Geogreen as part of a larger gap analysis study due in early 2011. It uses a modified ‘traffic-light’ style of colour coding of prospectivity, which is based on the broad geological characteristics of the regions, including the presence of potential storage and sealing sediments. This is a guide to the regions where storage exploration is most likely to be successful.The areas marked in green are considered highly suitable or suitable for further screening and exploration, whereas the yellow regions may be suitable. The white areas are regions that are predominantly igneous or metamorphic rocks (including granites, basalt, and metamorphosed rocks), which are largely unsuitable for storage. The grey areas represent those regions where no data are available (primarily due to ice cover). Blue areas designate offshore regions where the water depth is too great for economic storage, and brown areas are unproven with evidence of volcanic rocks.
In recent years, more detailed regional assessments have been undertaken.Regional studies provide estimates that generally fall into the ‘screening’ or a theoretical resource estimate (as defined in Figure 39). Larger-scale assessments at the national and regional level or the basin or continental level cover a much larger area and rely on high-level data sets and analyses that provide an overview. However, they have much higher uncertainty than estimates associated with CO2 storage resources that have used more detailed data sets. As a result, the high level assessments tend to overestimate the potential capacity. Despite this uncertainty, these higher-level storage viability and capacity estimates are important as they identify whether a region has the potential for significant storage and point to where more local and site-specific exploration and assessments should be undertaken.Desktop studies of this type are relatively low-cost (usually much less than US$10 million). To select a site for injection, the screening study is normally followed by a more costly workflow of exploration and testing that matures the understanding of one or more storage resources to an estimate of ‘practical storage capacity’. This term is roughly analogous to the definition of petroleum reserve by the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE et al. 2007). As with petroleum reserves, the capacity estimates for a given project will change repeatedly for years after initial injection, as the ‘performance’ of the storage reservoir in the injection phase is better understood.
Construction and operation costs will vary within and across countries. This is influenced by:Share of imported equipment and materials used as against local materialsLabour costs and productivityCost and quality of different fuel typesA set of country specific indices reflecting differences in equipment, materials and labour costs were developed to translate the reference costs to different regions.Costs for coal technologies in Easter Europe and China are estimated to be around 85 per cent of the costs in the United States Gulf Coast, whilst cost in the European region and Japan are some 40-55 per cent higher.