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Long article from the Calgary Times

Burying CO2: Fix or folly?


BY GRAHAM THOMSON, EDMONTON JOURNALOCTOBER 3, 2009COMMENTS (7)


STORYPHOTOS ( 1 )

LINK:
http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/energy-resources/Burying+folly/2064972/story.html


Dr. David Vincent reads the markings on the pipe that brings liquified CO2 from a coal gasification plant in North Dakota to Weyburn, Sask.
Photograph by: Joshua Sawka, Canwest News Service, File, Edmonton Journal
In 2008, Edmonton Journal columnist Graham Thomson was awarded a fellowship from the Canadian Journalism Foundation that gave him a year of academic and journalistic freedom to study any courses that caught his interest at the University of Toronto.

Besides dabbling in modern english poetry, he spent the 2008-09 academic year focused on energy and environmental issues, including the emerging technology of carbon capture and storage.

That led to an invitation from the Program on Water Issues at the Munk Centre for International Studies, which each year commissions an author to write a public policy report on a water-related topic that is then the focus of a day-long symposium at the U of T.

This year's topic was Burying Carbon Dioxide in Underground Saline Aquifers: Political Folly or Climate Change Fix? The result of Thomson's research was a 63-page report (25,000 words and 176 footnotes) that was peer reviewed by a group of scientists over the summer and then presented by Thomson at the U of T on Sept. 23.

Today, Sunday Reader presents a synopsis of Thomson's report:

It promises to clean our dirty coal, green the oilsands and save the global climate.

Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) -- a complicated title for what is essentially a simple concept.

Instead of continuing to send our emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal, we would capture the emissions in the smokestacks, compress them into a fluid and inject them deep underground.

Thus, CCS promises to turn our world upside down when it comes to our emissions of carbon dioxide.

Proponents argue a fully functional CCS system would fight global warming, while allowing us to continue with the seemingly contradictory practice that got us into the climate change predicament to begin with: burning huge quantities of fossil fuels.

Scientists working on CCS argue the technology will be safe and effective with careful site selection and management.

However, CCS technology is expensive, would require large amounts of fresh water and energy, and is unproven on an industrial level at the scale necessary to achieve significant climate change results.

Nobody knows how billions of tonnes of highly compressed carbon dioxide will behave underground over centuries. Could CO2 eventually leak and find its way into underground sources of drinking water (USDWs)?The challenges relating to CCS are enormous, but some scientists maintain that they can be met.

Leaders in the energy industry suggest we have little option but to embrace CCS. Lord Oxburgh of the Royal Dutch/Shell oil group is blunt: "Sequestration is difficult. But if we don't have sequestration, I see very little hope for the world."

However, detractors say CCS is what you do when you're in a hurry and have no plan "B."

Who's right?The clock is ticking. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, every tonne of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere contributes to global warming.

The best candidates for CCS are large point sources of emissions--the facilities that emit large amounts of CO2.These include industrial facilities such as cement plants, steel factories and most notably, coal-fired power plants.

The old adage that "coal is king" is as true today as it was a century ago.

It keeps the lights on, the fridge cold and the computer charged. You might communicate by cellphone and shop in cyberspace but you likely recharge your electronics via coal. Seventy per cent of the power in Alberta comes from coal-fired plants. In the United States, half of all electrical generation is thanks to coal.

There are over 600 coal-fired power plants in the United States and 21 in Canada.

Coal is inexpensive and abundant. It is also dirty. The average 600-megawatt power plant emits four to five million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

If we cannot or will not shut down the big emitters of CO2 we have to do something to shut down the emissions. That's where carbon capture and storage comes in.

The Pembina Institute, an environmental organization in Alberta, is candid. "The stakes are high," it said in a January 2008 report which pointed to CCS "as one of a number of potentially effective technologies for reducing GHG emissions on the scale required to combat dangerous climate change."

For the Pembina Institute, CCS is not a silver bullet for global warming but an arrow in a quiver. At this point, though, it's the biggest arrow we've got. Alternative energies (wind and solar) are expensive. Energy conservation is difficult. Nuclear power is controversial and expensive to construct. CCS carries the promise of business as usual with a minimum of inconvenience to the consumer. Under the promise of CCS, we can keep on burning massive amounts of fossil fuels.

To implement CCS on the scale necessary to combat global warming will be, in the words of a proponent, a "large, massive, daunting task." The words do not do it justice. The scale is staggering.

In Alberta, for example, the government wants to sequester five million tonnes of CO2 a year by 2015 in a$2-billion experiment.

In the next phase, it will be spending as much as $3 billion a year in conjunction with the federal government to sequester 30 million tonnes a year

By 2050, Alberta promises to be injecting 140 million tonnes a year. By comparison, the longest-running sequestration project in the world, Statoil's Sleipner project, currently injects a relatively tiny one million tonnes a year.

On a global context, sequestering one billion tonnes of carbon would mean building 3,600 injection projects on the scale of the Sleipner project. Some estimates say we should be sequestering 10 billion tonnes of CO2 a year globally to make a dent in the climate.

David Hawkins, head of the climate change program at the Natural Resources Defense Council and an advocate of CCS, says the scale should not be an impediment: "Yes, burying billions of tons of CO2 is a huge job, but that is not necessarily an argument against CCS. You can't solve a big problem without a big effort."

However, the effort necessary would not be merely "big" but so immense as to be impractical, according to Vaclav Smil, an energy expert at the University of Manitoba.

Smil, a self-described "intellectual agent provocateur," has declared "carbon sequestration is irresponsibly portrayed as an imminently useful option for solving the challenge (of global warming)."

Smil has estimated that simply capturing a fraction of global emissions and sequestering them in one year would require moving volumes of fluid CO2 on a scale similar to the worldwide transportation of oil, a massive enterprise requiring tens of years and trillions of dollars. "Beware of the scale," he said. "Sequestering a mere 1/ 10 of today's global CO2 emissions (about three billion tonnes)would thus call for putting in place an industry that would have to force underground every year the volume of compressed gas larger than or ...equal to the volume of crude oil extracted globally by the petroleum industry whose infrastructures and capacities have been put in place over a century of development. Needless to say, such a technical feat could not be accomplished within a single generation."

Which brings us back to Alberta's assurance that it is "committed to reducing projected emissions by 200 megatonnes by 2050--70 per cent of which will be achieved through CCS."

That target actually falls far short of the IPCC's recommended reductions for industrialized nations--but at this point nobody knows if Alberta, or anyone else, can even reach a moderate target via CCS.

It's not just Alberta politicians who may be getting ahead of themselves with CCS.

In 2008, U. S. President Barack Obama praised the promise of CCS in an interview with CBC by saying, "I think that it is possible for us to create a set of clean energy mechanisms that allow us to use things not just like oilsands, but also coal."

Canadian Environment Minister Jim Prentice has already proclaimed CCS a proven technology and he confidently predicted success tomorrow: "It is applied commercially in Enhanced Oil Recovery kinds of operations and it will be commercial in the future."

The reality of CCS is that it is as much about the politics as about the science or economics. The political assurances are premature, the promises ethereal, but for anyone dependent on fossil fuels the allure of "clean coal" is irresistible.

If CCS is to make coal "clean" it has to dispose of the dirty emissions somewhere. And that takes us deep underground.

To get a good idea of where to go about sequestering CO2 in Canada, perhaps the best source is the United States Department of Energy's website, which contains the Carbon Sequestration Atlas of the United States and Canada (Second Edition).

The Atlas is an impressive 140-page report with colourful, informative maps that graphically illustrate the locations of the largest emitters of carbon dioxide and the best locations to bury those emissions.

As the title suggests this is a transboundary investigation that looks at carbon sources and potential sequestration locations as if the 49th parallel didn't exist. And it surely does not exist underground in the geologic formations where Canada and the U. S. hope one day to bury a large portion of their carbon waste.

The Atlas is also a graphic illustration of how the Americans are looking at carbon sequestration, not merely as a national issue but as a continental strategy.

The best geologic formations for sequestering carbon dioxide are mature oil and natural gas reservoirs, deep unmineable coal seams and, most importantly, deep saline formations or aquifers. The aquifers are sponge-shaped rock formations filled with salt water and are prevalent throughout western North America, including Alberta and Saskatchewan.

They potentially have an enormous storage capacity for carbon dioxide estimated to range from 3,900 billion tonnes to 12,200 billion tonnes--enough theoretical space to sequester CO2 emissions for centuries. But the Atlas has a caveat: "Much less is known about saline formations because they lack the characterization experience that industry has acquired through resource recovery from oil and gas reservoirs and coal seams.

"Therefore, there is a greater amount of uncertainty regarding the suitability of saline formations for CO2 storage."

It is in saline aquifers that scientists plan to sequester most of our carbon dioxide emissions.

We can catch a glimpse of how carbon capture and sequestration might work on a grand scale by watching how it already works on the small. CCS is underway at three unrelated pilot projects in Weyburn, Sask., Algeria and off the coast of Norway where a total of roughly five million tonnes of CO2 is injected into geologic formations each year.

In each of these projects, the capture of the CO2 is not performed at a coal-fired plant but is part of the routine process of stripping excess CO2 during the production of natural or synthetic gas.

In the Weyburn project the liquefied CO2 is captured from a coal gasification plant in North Dakota, compressed into a fluid and shipped 330 kilometres by pipeline across the border to Saskatchewan.

There, it is injected underground not into a saline aquifer but into an old oil field to squeeze out more oil in a well-known process called enhanced oil recovery (EOR).

However, EOR is not the same as CCS. EOR has been employed over a relatively short term (decades) to recover oil from a depleted field. It is not concerned with storing carbon dioxide indefinitely, or even with keeping track of where the CO2 ends up after the EOR process is completed.

Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal explained the difference between the two in a cautionary speech in May to the 8th Annual Conference on Carbon Sequestration in Pittsburgh.

Freudenthal has high hopes for CCS but admitted the still unproven technology for long-term sequestration is "not ready for primetime." As Freudenthal points out, CO2 injected underground in a saline aquifer can form carbonic acid and if that happens "you have more than an adequate mixture to dissolve cement in an oilfield plug" and cause a leak.

That's why he says carbon capture and storage projects will have to be designed differently than enhanced oil recovery projects. "It is not proper to equate EOR activities automatically with CCS," he concludes.

Using CCS to recover more oil is, of course, economically attractive -so attractive that a recently released report on CCS for the Alberta government emphasizes the Enhanced Oil Recovery side of CCS, arguing that by injecting 450 million tonnes of carbon dioxide underground, the province could recover an extra 1.4 billion barrels of oil from conventional reservoirs worth $105 billion (assuming $75 per barrel of oil).

Let's look at that from a different angle. Burning three barrels of oil on average generates about one tonne of CO2 which means that burning those 1.4 billion barrels will produce about 444 million tonnes of CO2-almost exactly the amount of CO2 injected in the first place. In other words, Alberta could claim to have buried 450 million tonnes of CO2 but as far as the global climate is concerned almost no carbon dioxide would have been removed from the atmosphere.Gov.Freudenthal's warning points to another

concern with large-scale CCS: leaks of carbon dioxide through old oil and gas wells.

Western North America--the region where most of the CCS projects will take place--is a veritable pincushion of oil and gas wells, some dating back a century or more. Alberta has an estimated 350,000 oil and gas wells puncturing the earth.

There will be leaks.

David Keith, a CCS expert based at the University of Calgary, said as much in a paper investigating the leakage of wastewaster pumped deep underground in Florida that made its into underground sources of drinking water. The analogy to large scale CCS is inescapable.

"It seems unlikely that large-scale injection of CO2 can proceed without at least some leakage," concluded Keith. The answer, he says, is to create procedures "dealing with leaks when they occur."

Experts such as Keith think a catastrophic leak is a remote possibility and that the chance that a properly engineered CCS project would contaminate groundwater is a "long shot." Keith, a firm proponent of CCS, argues that any risks associated with CCS are far less than the consequences of allowing global warming to remain unchecked: "Just to put this in perspective, right now we kill 3,000 people a year from fine particulate pollution from coal-fired power plants. You've got to have some perspective on what the relative risks are."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a supporter of limited CCS, predicts the vast majority of CO2 will stay in place.

The best sites would be those with strong cap rocks and few if any old wells puncturing the rock. "If, however, you have abandoned wells or if you have faults and fractures that create a short circuit for the water, it could go up those," says Dr. Sally Benson of Stanford University, also a proponent of CCS.

According to the MIT report The Future of Coal, "[t]here are large numbers of orphaned or abandoned wells that may not be adequately plugged, completed, or cemented...Little is known about the specific probability of escape from a given well, the likelihood of such a well existing within a potential site, or the risk such a well presents in terms of potential leakage volume or consequence."

It should be noted that coal-fired plants won't be injecting pure, food-grade CO2 into the ground but rather a soup of other elements and chemicals.

"Captured CO2 often contains various by-products of combustion processes such as nitrogen oxides (NOx) and sulphur dioxide (SO2)as well as trace heavy metals including lead, mercury and cadmium," says a Greenpeace report into carbon capture and storage called False Hope.

The report warns that "co-storage of CO2 with sulphur dioxide (SO2) increases the risk of leakage due to its chemical properties. In contact with water, SO2 forms the highly corrosive sulphuric acid that more readily dissolves materials, such as the cement used to seal wells. A greater risk of leakage means higher likelihood of damage and liability.

"How much SO2, if any, to allow in captured CO2 streams will need to be determined."

The American Water Works Association --representing more than 4,600 utilities that supply water to 180 million people in North America--is afraid large-scale CCS projects could endanger underground sources of drinking water not just through leaks but through displacement of saline.

Simply put, the pressurized carbon dioxide plume injected over years could force salt water from the aquifer into underground sources of drinking water.

"This can cause saline aquifers located close to the carbon dioxide plume to be displaced into existing USDWs (Underground Sources of Drinking Water), contaminating the freshwater aquifer and rendering it unusable as a drinking water resource," said Don Broussard, a board director with the AWWA, in a presentation to the U. S. government in 2008.

What happens when we have a leak? Who is responsible?

At this point, we don't know. This uncertainty could bring large-scale CCS to a halt before it even gets started. The companies operating the sequestration sites would probably be liable during the sequestration process and government would probably take over after a site was decommissioned. But this remains undecided.

In the race to establish large-scale CCS projects, the United States is moving quickly to address the complicated questions of how to regulate the process and assign or assume liability.

In July 2008, the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed new federal requirements for protecting the nation's drinking water to "address the unique nature of CO2 for GS[geological storage].The relative buoyancy of CO2, its corrosivity in the presence of water, the potential presence of impurities in captured CO2, its mobility within subsurface formations, and large injection volumes anticipated at full scale deployment warrant specific requirements tailored to this new practice."

Since 2005, the EPA has held seven workshops and two public stakeholder meetings on the effective management of geological carbon storage. Canada has held none.

This summer Natural Resources Canada helped create a federal-provincial CCS Network to coordinate various provincial and federal departments that are working on issues such as the protection of groundwater. However, like much of the CCS regulatory development in Canada, the workings of the provincial-federal CCS Network is a closed-door process that is difficult for the public to unlock.

Alberta, at this point, seems intent on regulating large-scale CCS with rules under its Class III well system that is designed for small-scale injection of acid gas through the Energy Resources Conservation Board. Acid gas is carbonic acid and hydrogen sulfide (H2S) that is stripped from sour gas wells and injected into geologic formations. The practice has been performed in western Canada for 20 years and, like enhanced oil recovery, is offered by proponents as proof that CCS can work safely.

Acid gas injections, however, are small compared with the plans for large-scale CCS. "The current ERCB requirements for acid gas injection need to be reviewed in light of the large volumes of CO2 which will be injected," says Mary Griffiths, a renowned former researcher on CCS and water issues for the Pembina Institute. Her position is bolstered by the EPA which studied acid gas injections in the U. S. and concluded new regulations are needed for full-scale CCS.

Alberta has a series of partnerships studying CCS, including the Heartland Area Redwater Project (HARP), the Alberta Saline Aquifer Project (ASAP), and the Wabamun Area CO2 Storage Project(WASP), demonstrating, among other things, a talent for acronyms

All are investigating a workable CCS system but none so far has an operating pilot project that captures CO2 from a coal-fired smokestack, transports it by pipeline and sequesters it in the earth. But then, nobody else in the world has managed to do that, either.

Full-scale CCS projects remain stubbornly attached to the drawing board. Some promising pilot projects, such as one in northern Germany, have been held up by public fear over injecting large amounts of CO2 underground. The opposition has been dubbed NUMBY--Not Under My Backyard.

The three to five pilot projects Alberta hoped to be approved this summer are still in negotiations with the province over funding. The number of potential projects has been reduced to three, at most.

None are in the oil sands.

A cautionary tale can be found in Alberta's oil sands that initially looked to CCS as a way to mitigate the industry's huge carbon footprint. With CCS, Premier Ed Stelmach was proud and optimistic that he had found a way to green the tar sands and improve his province's battered environmental image. "Alberta believes CCS can help ensure the economy and the environment both thrive in the 21st century. That is the backbone of Alberta's position, a pragmatic approach that will allow us to continue to make a significant contribution to the Canadian economy while at the same time protecting the environment."

However, oil sands companies have backed away from CCS, realizing the technology will likely not help the industry reduce CO2 pollution because the oil sands have too many diffuse emission sources, such as the huge trucks used in the extraction process. In 2008, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation obtained internal federal briefing notes that explained that CCS is better suited to large single-point industrial sources of CO2 such as coal-fired plants. "Only a small percentage of emitted CO2 is 'capturable' since most emissions aren't pure enough," the notes say. "Only limited near-term opportunities exist in the oil sands and they largely relate to upgrader facilities."

Despite this, the Alberta government insists CCS will somehow help the oil sands in a significant way. The government's assurance that 140 million tonnes of CO2 will be sequestered each year requires explanation. Even a firm supporter of CCS has his doubts. "I don't know where they got that 140 number from," says David Keith.

"The Alberta government to my knowledge does not have any substantive, bottom-up technological economic analysis that produces that number and the reality is that it is beyond anybody's ability to guess how the different technologies shake down by 2050."

Many sincere and credible scientists argue that CCS remains the best mitigation option and some environmental groups such as the Pembina Institute advocate for CCS as a bridging mechanism to reduce greenhouse gases while building and investing in renewable energy.

The technology holds the promise of massive reductions in emissions but any success may ultimately be limited to a relatively few projects due to cost, liability, technology, scale and public skepticism. CCS may turn out to be another costly Faustian bargain and classic technical fix.

Instead of buying us time to find alternate sources of clean energy, CCS is buying politicians' time to avoid making tough, unpopular decisions. The allure of CCS as a political fix threatens to divert resources from energy efficiency and delay more durable reforms.

"It is being used as the excuse for not doing anything," said Dr. David Suzuki in an interview. He compares CCS to dead-end, dangerous or destructive practices of the past, including widespread spraying of DDT, false hopes raised by nuclear fusion, and the dumping of nerve gas and other toxins into the oceans. "CCS is exactly the same thing based on the observation that when you pump carbon dioxide into the ground you can squeeze a little more oil out of a depleting well and low-and-behold the carbon doesn't come back out. What's it doing down there?...How long will it stay down?We have no idea."

Current CCS technology will also aggravate the growing energy-water nexus. It takes energy to move water and it takes water to make energy. Coal-fired power plants are among the largest users of water in both Canada and the United States and often compete with other industries for water.

Retrofitting coal-fired plants with CCS will increase energy demands by 20 to 30 per cent. As a consequence CCS could substantially increase freshwater consumption by fossil-based power plants.

Many economic alternatives to CCS exist but to date they have received little attention. They include the systematic reduction of fossil fuel consumption, improved energy efficiency, the control of fugitive emissions or leaks from the energy industry, a dedicated carbon tax, and the protection and restoration of important carbon sinks such as forests, grasslands and peat bogs. Technologies that capture carbon from the air or convert CO2 to formic acid may also prove to be more economic than CCS.

The Bottom Line

In sum, the marriage of a brave new technology with a political fix for an immediate climate problem could have negative long-term consequences for Canadian taxpayers and water drinkers without stabilizing the climate. If we ultimately decide to move forward on the sequestration of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide in underground saline aquifers, we need strong regulations, clear liability, effective oversight, sound science and a transparent decision-making process. To do otherwise would be sheer folly.

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