Exxon Mobil and CCS

ExxonMobil is a world leader in carbon management technologies and has researched and developed carbon-handling technologies for more than 30 years.

Lets see what’s happening at its natural gas plant, Wyoming.

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ExxonMobil’s natural gas plant, La Barge, Wyoming emits 4 million tons per year.

At the urging of state officials, the Texas oil giant has undertaken a $70 million project to capture and store 6 million metric tons of emissions annually from its natural gas plant in La Barge, Wyoming, an increase of 50 percent from the current 4 million tons per year.

The new project — combined with expertise acquired during decades of dabbling in carbon sequestration could give Exxon an odd lead in the race to devise emissions-control technologies.

According to the Wall Street Journal the company plans to spend another $100 million testing technology for stripping carbon out of natural gas by 2010. This could make carbon capture and storage more affordable and significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The company plans to build a commercial demonstration plant near La Barge, Wyoming, where it will use ExxonMobil’s Controlled Freeze Zone TM technology, known as CFZTM.

CFZTM is a single-step cryogenic separation process that freezes out and then melts the carbon dioxide and removes other components including hydrogen sulfide, which is found in so-called sour gas. If successful, the process will reduce the cost of carbon dioxide removal from produced natural gas.

{Controlled Freeze Zone is a single-step cryogenic separation process that freezes out and then melts the carbon dioxide and removes other impurities found in sour gas. The high-pressure liquid stream of carbon dioxide could then be injected underground, where it could be safely stored, or re-used for deployment in reservoir management to enhance oil recovery.}

“This technology will assist in the development of additional gas resources to meet the world’s growing demand for energy …..,” said Mark Albers, senior vice president of Exxon Mobil Corporation

Using the CFZ™ process, reduces the cost of separation, transportation and reinjection. The CFZ™ process can eliminate the use of solvents, sulfur plants and carbon dioxide venting in processing of the natural gas.

The new demonstration plant will be located at ExxonMobil’s Shute Creek Treating Facility. It will process about 14 million cubic feet of gas per day for injection.

Late 2009 will see the start of the operation. Testing will continue for a couple of years. I feel the advancement of Exxon’s CFZ technology should assist in its commercial application and also promote natural gas as an alternate fuel.

The detailed engineering, procurement and construction management will be provided by URS Washington Division. Their deep commitment to CCS prompted me to look at their activities globally on the same issue.

Europe has shown great interest in CCS and Exxon has seized the opportunity to be part of it. ExxonMobil is already participating in one of the best-known and longest-running CCS sites in the world – at the Sleipner Field in Norway. As part of this effort, they have worked on the capture and geologic storage of more than one million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year since 1998.

Exxon Mobil Corporation is to participate in a major European research initiative aimed at evaluating the role that Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology may play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

ExxonMobil will contribute over 1 million Euros and provide expert technical guidance to the CO2 Remove project, sponsored by the European Commission Directorate General for Research. ExxonMobil also conducts internal research into CCS-related technologies to support the corporation's commercial operations.

It also achieved zero spills from ExxonMobil-operated and long-term chartered marine vessels in 2008 and reduced the number of spills greater than one barrel by 60 percent since 2001.

In addition to their in-house research programs, ExxonMobil supports carbon capture and storage research at the International Energy Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Research & Development Program, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgia Tech, the University of Texas and Stanford University.

That is their record. Over the past 25 years, ExxonMobil has invested more than $380 billion worldwide in future energy development – which is more than their total earnings during that same period. And since 2004 alone, they have invested more than $1.5 billion in activities to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and improve energy efficiency, with plans to spend at least half-a-billion dollars more on additional energy efficiency initiatives over the next few years.

I have a hunch CFZ™, could play an important role in future widespread use of carbon capture and storage to significantly reduce the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

I agree with Exxon when it says a carbon tax is better positioned than cap-and-trade as a policy option to help reduce the growth of greenhouse-gas emissions. A carbon tax reduces policy risks for businesses and investors in a way that cap-and-trade schemes do not.

So we see they are collaborating with academic institutions, automotive manufacturers and other organizations to improve energy efficiency and to develop low carbon technologies. From on-board hydrogen generation to high performance films for lithium ion batteries to next generation algae-based bio fuels, [ExxonMobil has invested$600 million in algae biofuels research spear headed by Craig Venter].

ExxonMobil is investing in breakthrough technologies to provide economically viable, scalable energy solutions to address the risks posed by GHG emissions.

May their tribe increase!

Carbon Capture and Storage Demonstration by Total

Total on January 11 inaugurated Europe’s first end-to-end carbon capture, transportation and storage demonstration facility in Lacq, southwestern France, at a ceremony attended by Valérie Létard, France’s Secretary of State for Green Technology and Climate Negotiations.

The industrial demonstration has three key objectives:

1. To improve mastery of the oxyfuel combustion process, particularly with a view to applications in the production of extra-heavy oils.
2. To halve the cost of carbon capture compared to existing processes.
3. To develop monitoring methods and instruments to demonstrate on a larger scale the reliability and sustainability of long-term CO2 storage technology.

The project by Total involves converting one of the steam boilers of the Lacq field’s steam generating plant to an oxyfuel combustion unit. It then intends to capture and compress its CO2 emissions, transporting the gas via a 27 Km gas pipeline, for injection into the nearly-depleted Rousse natural gas reservoir in the Lacq area, at a depth of 4,500 meters.

The pilot plant, which will produce some 40 tonnes of steam per hour for use by the industries of the Lacq complex, will emit up to 120,000 tonnes of CO2 over a two-year period. The Rousse well is subject to close monitoring, with detectors located throughout the surface and subsoil regions to measure the injection flow, pressure, temperature and concentration of the CO2.

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Carbon Capture at Hydrogen Plant

British Petroleum P.L.C. plans to solicit bids for a $2 billion hydrogen power plant, the world's first industrial-scale facility of its kind.

The 400-megawatt Hydrogen Power Abu Dhabi project, a joint venture between B.P. and Masdar. The facility is designed to capture upto 90 percent of the carbon dioxide generated by the plant. B.P. plans to inject 1.7 million tons of carbon dioxide captured annually in oil fields in Abu Dhabi.

Hydrogen plants use fossil fuels like natural gas and split them into hydrogen and carbon dioxide. The hydrogen gas is used to generate electricity while the heat-trapping gas is captured and stored underground. The plant will receive natural gas from the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, which will also buy the carbon dioxide separated through the process.

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Carbon Sequestration Plant

Federal officials on Monday released their draft environmental study for a pioneering carbon sequestration project proposed for western Wyoming.

Cimarex Energy Co. of Denver is proposing to construct the large-scale carbon sequestration project as part of its Rand Butte Project along the Wyoming Range in southwest Wyoming.

Company officials think the $100 million effort would be the largest sequestration project in the world, and, when completed, the plant could also account for about 30 percent of the world’s helium production.

The project aims to test new technologies for capturing and then reinjecting all the by-product gases — primarily CO2 and H2S — back into their source producing formation.

The BLM’s assessment said the project would test a new cryogenic gas processing technology to separate economical gases from CO2 and H2S. The project will also test a practice that immediately reinjects the unwanted gases back into the formation without further processing.

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Carbon Capture – Good Business

There is a strong business case scenario for carbon capture, even without carbon taxes and cap and trade.

If you took carbon dioxide from power plants and sold it to oil producers for enhanced oil recovery, you could double the existing, economically recoverable oil reserves in the region.

It takes around $150 to capture and sequester a ton of carbon dioxide. The oil industry will pay almost $110 a ton for carbon dioxide at the well head. That means carbon would cost $40 a ton to sequester. However, the capital and operational costs of sequestration should go down with the development of better technology.

Exploiting captured carbon dioxide in this manner, however, would lead to more carbon being injected into atmosphere.Secondly this could lead to less interest in biofuels as an alternate energy source.

The International Energy Agency has estimated that carbon capture will have to account for 20 percent of the total carbon dioxide reductions by 2050 just to keep the level of carbon in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million level, considered by many the maximum level humanity can endure.

By 2030, the world, ideally, will have 850 CCS plants storing 2,000 gigatons a year. By 2050, the number of CCS plants should grow to 3,400 projects said Nick Otter, who heads up the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, a think tank supported by $200 million from the Australian government.

Debates continue over which technology might work best - post-combustion or pre- combustion. Unfortunately, carbon capture technology largely exists in theory right now. Only 18 major projects might be complete by 2015. And even getting those 18 constructed remains a challenge.

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CCS permanent sequestration processes

What to do with the CO2 after it has been captured?

Small quantities of essentially pure CO2 can be used for industrial applications including carbonated beverages but, at the scale required for significantly reducing atmospheric CO2 emissions, the two main options for CO2 capture are

(a) using CO2 for Enhanced Oil Recovery(EOR)
(b) permanent sequestration.

These applications require CO2 to be compressed to about 150 bar. Multiple compressor stages with inter-stage cooling are necessary to reach this minimum miscible pressure for EOR.

To learn more about these stages visit this site More

Carbon capture - Exxon Mobil

ExxonMobil is investing more than $100m in a new technology for separating CO2 from natural gas at the inlet to the process plant QATAR which could help commercialise some applications of carbon capture and storage.

For more than 30 years ,Exxon Mobil engineers and scientists have researched, developed and applied technologies that could play a role in making CCS viable in commercial applications. Their Controlled Freeze Zone technology is a single step process that could more efficiently separate CO2 and other impurities from a natural gas stream.

ExxonMobil is working with partners on a number of CCS related research projects such as improved capture technology; geologic storage and integrity modeling; assessing well sealing integrity and storage capacity of oil and gas reservoirs acquifiers for potential storage use.

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CO2 capture and storage - cost

This report was prepared by Research and Development Solutions, LLC (RDS) for the United States Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory.

This work was completed under DOE NETL Contract Number DE-AC26-04NT41817 and performed under RDS Subtask 41817-402.01.01

The authors wish to acknowledge the excellent guidance, contributions and cooperation of the NETL staff, particularly: Philip DiPietro, NETL Technical Monitor
Christopher Nichols, OSAP, Situational Analysis and Benefits Division.

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The first industrial CO2 capture and storage site

CO2 capture, transport and storage are promising approaches, pointed up by international experts, to preserving the planet and helping to fight climate change.

These processes aid to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of industrial facilities that use fossil fuels (fuel oil, gas or coal) such as power plants, steel mills, cement factories, oil refineries.

Air Liquid is contributing to this project by supplying the technology of CO2 capture by means of oxycombustion. This process consists in replacing the air in an industrial boiler by pure oxygen. The fumes obtained when they come out of the boiler are then very concentrated in CO2 (90%).

On January 11, 2010, the inauguration of the first European pilot integrating the entire process of capturing and storing CO2, the main greenhouse gas responsible for the planet’s global warming, will be held on the Lacq site in France.

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Cutting Carbon: Should We Capture and Store It?

Could storing carbon set us up for future disasters?

It's unlikely, say an increasing number of industry figures who want governments to embrace CCS as the most pragmatic response to climate change. Bjorn Berger, a research adviser to Norway's Statoil, says using CCS is a no-brainer.

"It has been staying where we put it," he says of the carbon there. "We study it very carefully and know exactly what it does. If we get realistic about the fact that we need the fossil fuels in the development of places like China and India, then this is a way to make that acceptable."

Otter, CEO of the GCCSI, says, "The only way to understand CCS is to actually do it." Addressing the energy summit, he urged governments to move quickly. "We cannot do without this, in my view. We're looking for really positive and quick action... Deployment is what we're talking about. Not research."

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Best carbon capture process

The U.S. Department of Energy is looking for new carbon-capture technologies that can reduce this so-called parasitic load on power production below 30 percent.

Calera's Brent Constantz says his company's relatively low-cost cement-making process can surpass that, cutting a plant's energy drain in half to less than 15 percent. And he says adding in the potential profits from Calera's green cement would completely offset the financial loss of reduced power plant output.

"Our costs of goods are lower than Portland cement because we don't have to burn coal or build a quarry and quarry limestone," he explains, "so our capital costs are quite a bit lower." He estimates using Calera's technology would effectively cut the parasitic load to zero.

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