Decarbonisation Technology - August 2023 Issue

Growth in the UK and Europe Despite the challenges, CCS remains part of many countries’ net-zero road maps, not least in the UK, where the government’s recent Powering Up Britain report reaffirmed its commitment to CCS, with a £20 billion funding package announced in the Spring Budget (UK Gov, 2023). The announcement includes the rollout and acceleration of the UK’s first carbon capture sites in Teesside under the North Sea, which the government hopes will be able to capture and store more than 50 million tonnes of CO₂ per year by 2035. Meanwhile, in Europe, there are encouraging signs that both decarbonisation goals and significant policy support have stimulated development, particularly in the form of industrial clusters connected to CO₂ storage hubs. Around 50 projects could be capturing close to 70 million tonnes of CO₂ per year by 2030 around the North Sea in Norway, the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark (Pernot, 2022). ABB is already involved in one such project. Norway’s Northern Lights project, a joint venture between Equinor, Shell, and TotalEnergies, is the first industrial CCS project to develop an open and flexible infrastructure to safely store CO₂ from industries in Europe in the North Sea. The first phase will have the capacity to permanently store up to 1.5 million tonnes of CO₂ per year, with the ambition to expand to more than five million tonnes. ABB’s integrated automation, electrical, and digital solutions will

enable the remote operation of a new carbon capture terminal and ensure that the facility runs at optimum efficiency. Challenges to driving scale At a design level, the biggest cost in CCS is capture. The CO₂ always comes with impurities, which add risk. For example, when water, acids, sulphur oxide, nitrous oxide, and things like methanol and glycol are added, these impurities interact and can potentially cause problems during operations. This means that existing CCS projects need to take conservative design decisions. In Europe, major projects in the later stages of design are wary of using glycol to dehydrate the CO₂; instead, they turn to competing technology, which is $10-$15 million more expensive on a typical application. By understanding the fluid, a digital twin can be developed that takes into account those impurities and can also monitor and reduce the amount of power needed to pressurise and heat the CO₂. This is important because energy is not always easy to get to on a CCS network. There is not always a source of power at the point of injection or the midpoint of a pipeline or even excess power at the capture source. By deploying a digital twin, operators can be sure the plant is not over-compressing or overheating, resulting in significant Opex savings. Setting the pace While companies can see the benefits, there is still a reluctance to invest without clear