Tag: BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage)

The policy needed to save the future

6 December 2019

Carbon capture
Abstract picture of a modern building closeup

Over the past decade the United Kingdom has decarbonised significantly as coal power has been replaced by sources like biomass, wind and solar. Every year power generation emits fewer and fewer tonnes of carbon thanks to renewables and with the ban on the sale of new diesel and petrol cars coming in no later than 2040, roads and urban areas are about to get cleaner too.

However, there are still tough challenges ahead if the UK is to meet its target of carbon neutrality by 2050. Aviation, heavy industry, agriculture, shipping, power generation – some of the key activities of daily economic life – all remain reliant on fuels that emit carbon.

This is where Greenhouse Gas Removal (GGR) technologies have a big role to play. These can capture carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, and either store them or use them, helping the drive towards carbon neutrality.

While the idea of being able to capture carbon has been around for some time, the technology is fast catching up with the ambition. There now exist a number of credible solutions that allow for capturing emissions. The challenge, however, is putting in place the framework and policies needed to enable technologies to be implemented at scale.

Time is short. A recent report by Vivid Economics for the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) emphasised the need for government action now if we are to achieve the volume of carbon removal needed to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

The tech to take emissions out of the atmosphere

The planet naturally absorbs CO2, forests absorb it as they grow, mangroves trap it in flooded soils, and oceans absorb it from the air. So, harnessing this power through planting, growing and actively managing forests is one natural method of GGR that can be easily implemented by policy.

Aerial view of mangrove forest and river on the Siargao island. Philippines.

The idea of using technology to capture CO2 and prevent its release into the atmosphere has been around since the 1970s. It was first deployed successfully in enhanced oil recovery, when captured emissions are injected into underground oil reserves to help remove the oil from the ground.

Over time it’s been developed and is now in place in a number of fossil fuel power stations around the world, allowing them to cut emissions. However, by combining the same technology with renewable fuels like compressed biomass wood pellets, we can generate electricity that is carbon negative.

Each of these solutions operate in different ways, but all are important. Vivid Economics’ report emphasises that a range of different solutions will be required to reach a point where 130 million tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) are being removed from the atmosphere in the UK annually by 2050.

However, investment and clear government planning and guidance will be crucial in enabling the growth of GRR. The report estimates large-scale GGR could cost around £13 billion per year by 2050 in the UK alone, a figure similar in size to current government support for renewables.

“If you went back 20-odd years, people were sceptical of the role of wind, solar and biomass and whether the technologies would ever get to a cost point where they could be viably deployed at scale,” explains Drax Policy Analyst Richard Gow.

“In the last few years we’ve seen enormous cost reductions in renewables and people are far more confident in investing in them – that has been driven by very good government policy.”

GGR needs the same clear long-term strategy to enable companies to make secure investments and innovate. But what shape should those policies take for them to be effective?

Options for policies                    

Perhaps the most straightforward route to enabling GGR is to build on existing policies. For example, there are existing tree planting schemes such as the Woodland Carbon Fund, Woodland Carbon Code and the Country Stewardship Scheme, all of which could receive greater regulatory support, or additional rules obliging emitters to invest in actively managed forests.

More technically complex solutions, like bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS), could be incentivised by alternative mechanisms in order to provide clarity on, and to stabilise, revenue streams. These are already used to support companies building low-carbon power generation such as through the Contracts for Difference scheme and have been effective in encouraging investment in projects with high upfront costs and long-payback periods.

Alternative options to support the roll-out of negative emissions technologies should also be considered. For example, the government could make it obligatory for companies that contribute to emissions, to pay for GGR to avoid increased burden on electricity consumers.

In such a scenario, fossil fuel suppliers would be required to offset the emissions of their products by buying negative emissions certificates from GGR providers. As a result, the price of fossil fuels for users would likely rise to cover this expense and the costs would then be shared across the supply chain rather than just a single party.

Another approach that passes the costs of GGR deployment on to emitters is using emissions taxes to fund tax credits for GGR providers.

Making these tax credits tradable would also mean any large tax-paying company, such as a supermarket or bank, could buy tax credits from GGR providers. This approach would come at no cost to government as sales of the tax credits would be funded by an emissions tax and would offer revenue to GGR providers.

The challenge with tax credits, however, is they are vulnerable to changes in government. An alternative is to offer direct grants and long-term contracts with GGR providers which would ensure funding for projects that transcends changes in Parliament. They could, however, prove costly for government.

Whatever policy pathway the government may choose to follow, there are underlying foundations needed to support effective GGR deployment.

Making policies work

 There are still many unknown factors in GGR deployment, such as the precise volume that will be needed to counter hard-to-abate emissions. This means all policy must be flexible to allow for future changes, and the individual requirements of different regions (forest-based solutions might suit some regions, DACCS might be better in others).

Underlying the strength of any of these policies, is the need for accurate carbon accounting. Understanding how much emissions are removed from the atmosphere by each technology will be key to reaching a true net zero status and giving credibility to certificates and tax credits.

Pearl River Nursery, Mississippi

Proper accounting of different technologies’ impact will also be crucial in delivering innovation grants. These can come through the UK’s existing innovation structure and will be fundamental to jumpstarting the pilot programmes needed to test the viability of GGR approaches before commercialisation.

Different approaches to GGR have different levels of effectiveness as well as different costs. BECCS, for example, serves two purposes in both generating low-carbon power and capturing emissions – resulting in overall negative emissions across the supply chain. 

“It’s important to account for the full value chain of BECCS,” explains Gow. “Therefore, it should be rewarded through two mechanisms: a CfD for the clean electricity produced and an incentive for the negative emissions. A double policy here is important because you are providing two products which benefit different sectors of the economy, one benefits power consumers and the other provides a service to society and the environment as a whole, and cost should be apportioned as such.

BECCS and DACCS also have to consider wider supply chains, such as carbon transport and storage infrastructure. Although this requires a high initial investment, by connecting to industrial emitters, it can enable providers to recover the costs through charges to multiple network users.

Ultimately, the key to making any GGR policies work effectively and efficiently is speed. In order to put in place accounting principles, test different methods, and begin courting investors, government needs to act now.

The Vivid Economics report “is further confirmation of the vital role that BECCS will play in reaching a net zero-carbon economy and the need to deploy the UK’s first commercial project in the 2020s,” Drax Group CEO Will Gardiner says.

“Our successful BECCS pilot is already capturing a tonne of carbon a day. With the right policies in place, Drax could become the world’s first negative emissions power station and the anchor for a zero carbon economy in the Humber region.”

It will be significantly more cost efficient to begin deploying GGR in the next decade and slowly increase it up to the level of 130 MtCO2 per year, than attempting to rapidly build infrastructure in the 2040s in a last-ditch effort to meet carbon neutrality by 2050.

Read the Vivid Economics report for BEIS, Greenhouse Gas Removal (GGR) policy options – Final Report. Our response is here. Read an overview of negative emissions techniques and technologies. Find out more about Zero Carbon Humber, the Drax, Equinor and National Grid Ventures partnership to build the world’s first zero carbon industrial cluster and decarbonise the North of England.

Learn more about carbon capture, usage and storage in our series:

Climate change is the biggest challenge of our time

Will Gardiner, Chief Executive Officer, Drax Group

28 July 2019

Opinion
Drax Group CEO Will Gardiner

Climate change is the biggest challenge of our time and Drax has a crucial role in tackling it.

All countries around the world need to reduce carbon emissions while at the same time growing their economies. Creating enough clean, secure energy for industry, transport and people’s daily lives has never been more important.

Drax is at the heart of the UK energy system. Recently the UK government committed to delivering a net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and Drax is equally committed to helping make that possible.

We’ve recently had some questions about what we’re doing and I’d like to set the record straight.

How is Drax helping the UK reach its climate goals?

At Drax we’re committed to a zero-carbon, lower-cost energy future.

And we’ve accelerated our efforts to help the UK get off coal by converting our power station to using sustainable biomass. And now we’re the largest decarbonisation project in Europe.

We’re exploring how Drax Power Station can become the anchor to enable revolutionary technologies to capture carbon in the North of England.

And we’re creating more energy stability, so that more wind and solar power can come onto the grid.

And finally, we’re helping our customers take control of their energy – so they can use it more efficiently and spend less.

Is Drax the largest carbon polluter in the UK?

No. Since 2012 we’ve reduced our CO2 emissions by 84%. In that time, we moved from being western Europe’s largest polluter to being the home of the largest decarbonisation project in Europe.

And we want to do more.

We’ve expanded our operations to include hydro power, storage and natural gas and we’ve continued to bring coal off the system.

By the mid 2020s, our ambition is to create a power station that both generates electricity and removes carbon from the atmosphere at the same time.

Does building gas power stations mean the UK will be tied into fossil fuels for decades to come?

Our energy system is changing rapidly as we move to use more wind and solar power.

At the same time, we need new technologies that can operate when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining.

A new, more efficient gas plant can fill that gap and help make it possible for the UK to come off coal before the government’s deadline of 2025.

Importantly, if we put new gas in place we need to make sure that there’s a route through for making that zero-carbon over time by being able to capture the CO2 or by converting those power plants into hydrogen.

Are forests destroyed when Drax uses biomass and is biomass power a major source of carbon emissions?

No.

Sustainable biomass from healthy managed forests is helping decarbonise the UK’s energy system as well as helping to promote healthy forest growth.

Biomass has been a critical element in the UK’s decarbonisation journey. Helping us get off coal much faster than anyone thought possible.

The biomass that we use comes from sustainably managed forests that supply industries like construction. We use residues, like sawdust and waste wood, that other parts of industry don’t use.

We support healthy forests and biodiversity. The biomass that we use is renewable because the forests are growing and continue to capture more carbon than we emit from the power station.

What’s exciting is that this technology enables us to do more. We are piloting carbon capture with bioenergy at the power station. Which could enable us to become the first carbon-negative power station in the world and also the anchor for new zero-carbon cluster across the Humber and the North.

How do you justify working at Drax?

I took this job because Drax has already done a tremendous amount to help fight climate change in the UK. But I also believe passionately that there is more that we can do.

I want to use all of our capabilities to continue fighting climate change.

I also want to make sure that we listen to what everyone else has to say to ensure that we continue to do the right thing.

Laying down the pathway to carbon capture in a net zero UK

Will Gardiner, Chief Executive Officer, Drax Group

17 July 2019

Opinion
Humber bridge

The starting gun has fired and the challenge is underway. The government has officially set 2050 as the target year in which the UK will achieve carbon neutrality.

There’s no denying this economy-wide transformation will need a great deal of investment. Reaching net zero carbon emissions will require an evolutionary overhaul of not just Great Britain’s electricity system but the UK economy as a whole. And indeed, the way we live our lives and go about our business.

But that doesn’t mean it’s out of reach. Instead it will fall to technologies such as carbon capture usage and storage (CCUS), as well as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), to make it economical and possible.

The secret to making decarbonisation affordable

The UK’s Committee on Climate Change (CCC) estimates the price of decarbonisation will cost as little as 1% of forecast GDP per annum in 2050.

However, the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) Select Committee inquiry found that failure to deploy CCUS and BECCS technology could double the cost to 2%. There are a number of reasons for this, such as the cost to jobs, productivity and living standards of shutting down industrial emitters. CCUS’s ability to contribute to a hydrogen economy can help avoid this.

Moreover, the CCC claims even with industries striving to decarbonise rapidly, as much as 100 megatonnes of hard-to-abate carbon dioxide (CO2) is expected to remain in the UK economy by 2050.

This makes carbon negative techniques and technologies, such as BECCS – which uses woody biomass that has absorbed carbon in its lifetime as forests – alongside direct air capture (DAC), the boosting of ocean plant productivity, much greater tree planting and better sequestration of carbon in soil, essential if the UK is to attain true carbon neutrality.

The importance of BECCS and CCUS in the zero carbon future is clear. Now is the time for rapid development. Not in 2030, not in 2040, but today in 2019 and into the 2020s.

But doing this requires the government to move beyond its historic policies that have failed to support the technology in the past. Progress needs long-term frameworks that provide private sector investors with the certainty they need to kick-start the commercial-scale deployment of CCUS technologies.

Laying down the tracks to negative emissions  

For carbon capture to become an integrated part of the energy system it must deliver value well beyond the energy sector. Establishing markets for products developed from captured carbon will play a role here, but to set the wheels in motion, financial frameworks are needed that can allow BECCS and CCUS to thrive.

One device that can allow the market to develop CCUS is the creation of contracts for difference (CfDs) for carbon capture. These currently exist in the low-carbon generation space, between generators and the government-owned Low Carbon Contracts Company (LCCC). Through these contracts, power generators are paid the difference between their cost of generating low carbon electricity (known as a strike price) and the price of electricity in Great Britain’s wholesale power market. If the power price in the market is higher than the strike price generators pay the difference back to the LCCC, meaning consumers are protected from price spikes too.

It means that the generator is protected from market volatility or big drops in the wholesale price of power, offering the security to invest in new technology. More than this, CfDs last many years meaning they transcend political cycles and the cost per megawatt can be reduced with a longer contract. Creating a market for carbon capture or negative emissions generation could offer the same security to generators to invest in the technology.

A CfD for BECCS should not only incentivise the building of infrastructure to capture carbon, but we must also recognise the valuable role that negative emissions can play. By compensating BECCS producers for their negative emissions, it should provide a lower cost alternative to reducing all other CO2 emissions to zero, while still ensuring that the UK can get to net zero.

Beyond installing carbon capture at existing generation sites, one of the major financial barriers to the wider deployment of CCUS and BECCS is the cost and liability associated with transporting and storing captured carbon.

A Regulated Asset Base (RAB) funding model, would encourage investment by gradually recovering the costs of transport and storage via a regulated return. This approach is currently under consideration as a means of financing other major infrastructure projects.

A RAB allows businesses, including investment and pension funds, to invest in projects under the oversight of a government regulator. In exchange for their commitment, investors can collect a fee through regular consumer and non-domestic bills.

Led by industry; guided by government

Ultimately, the current carbon trading system is based around charging polluters. But as we approach a post-coal UK and in order to achieve net zero, it’s necessary for this to evolve – from economically disincentivising emissions to incentivising carbon-negative power generation.

However, with the cost of carbon capture and negative emissions differing between types of industries and technologies, there’s a requirement to consider differentiated carbon prices to guide industry through long-term strategy. But the need for carbon capture development is too pressing for us as an industry to wait.

At Drax Power Station our BECCS pilot is just the beginning of our wider ambitions to become the first negative emissions power station. Our use of biomass already makes Drax Power Station the largest generator of renewable electricity in Great Britain. The responsibly-managed working forests our suppliers source from absorbed carbon from the atmosphere as they grew so adding carbon capture at scale to this supply chain can turn our operation from low carbon, to carbon-neutral and eventually carbon negative.

And we have bigger plans still to create a net zero carbon industrial cluster in the Humber region, in partnership with Equinor and National Grid. The cluster would deliver carbon capture at the scale needed to not just decarbonise the most carbon-intensive industrial region in the UK, but to put the country at the forefront of the decarbonisation of industry and manufacturing.

Government action is needed to make CCUS and BECCS economically sustainable at scale as an integrated part of our energy system. However, the onus is on us, the energy industry to lead development and act as trusted partners that can deliver the decarbonisation needed to reach net zero carbon by 2050.

Learn more about carbon capture, usage and storage in our series:

What is a fuel cell and how will they help power the future?

27 June 2019

Carbon capture

How do you get a drink in space? That was one of the challenges for NASA in the 1960s and 70s when its Gemini and Apollo programmes were first preparing to take humans into space.

The answer, it turned out, surprisingly lay in the electricity source of the capsules’ control modules. Primitive by today’s standard, these panels were powered by what are known as fuel cells, which combined hydrogen and oxygen to generate electricity. The by-product of this reaction is heat but also water – pure enough for astronauts to drink.

Fuel cells offered NASA a much better option than the clunky batteries and inefficient solar arrays of the 1960s, and today they still remain on the forefront of energy technology, presenting the opportunity to clean up roads, power buildings and even help to reduce and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from power stations.

Power through reaction

At its most basic, a fuel cell is a device that uses a fuel source to generate electricity through a series of chemical reactions.

All fuel cells consist of three segments, two catalytic electrodes – a negatively charged anode on one side and a positively charged cathode on the other, and an electrolyte separating them. In a simple fuel cell, hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, is pumped to one electrode and oxygen to the other. Two different reactions then occur at the interfaces between the segments which generates electricity and water.

What allows this reaction to generate electricity is the electrolyte, which selectively transports charged particles from one electrode to the other. These charged molecules link the two reactions at the cathode and anode together and allow the overall reaction to occur. When the chemicals fed into the cell react at the electrodes, it creates an electrical current that can be harnessed as a power source.

Many different kinds of chemicals can be used in a fuel cell, such as natural gas or propane instead of hydrogen. A fuel cell is usually named based on the electrolyte used. Different electrolytes selectively transport different molecules across. The catalysts at either side are specialised to ensure that the correct reactions can occur at a fast enough rate.

For the Apollo missions, for example, NASA used alkaline fuel cells with potassium hydroxide electrolytes, but other types such as phosphoric acids, molten carbonates, or even solid ceramic electrolytes also exist.

The by-products to come out of a fuel cell all depend on what goes into it, however, their ability to generate electricity while creating few emissions, means they could have a key role to play in decarbonisation.

Fuel cells as a battery alternative

Fuel cells, like batteries, can store potential energy (in the form of chemicals), and then quickly produce an electrical current when needed. Their key difference, however, is that while batteries will eventually run out of power and need to be recharged, fuel cells will continue to function and produce electricity so long as there is fuel being fed in.

One of the most promising uses for fuel cells as an alternative to batteries is in electric vehicles.

Rachel Grima, a Research and Innovation Engineer at Drax, explains:

“Because it’s so light, hydrogen has a lot of potential when it comes to larger vehicles, like trucks and boats. Whereas battery-powered trucks are more difficult to design because they’re so heavy.”

These vehicles can pull in oxygen from the surrounding air to react with the stored hydrogen, producing only heat and water vapour as waste products. Which – coupled with an expanding network of hydrogen fuelling stations around the UK, Europe and US – makes them a transport fuel with a potentially big future.

 

Fuel cells, in conjunction with electrolysers, can also operate as large-scale storage option. Electrolysers operate in reverse to fuel cells, using excess electricity from the grid to produce hydrogen from water and storing it until it’s needed. When there is demand for electricity, the hydrogen is released and electricity generation begins in the fuel cell.

A project on the islands of Orkney is using the excess electricity generated by local, community-owned wind turbines to power a electrolyser and store hydrogen, that can be transported to fuel cells around the archipelago.

Fuel cells’ ability to take chemicals and generate electricity is also leading to experiments at Drax for one of the most important areas in energy today: carbon capture.

Turning CO2 to power

Drax is already piloting bioenergy carbon capture and storage technologies, but fuel cells offer the unique ability to capture and use carbon while also adding another form of electricity generation to Drax Power Station.

“We’re looking at using a molten carbonate fuel cell that operates on natural gas, oxygen and CO2,” says Grima. “It’s basic chemistry that we can exploit to do carbon capture.”

The molten carbonate, a 600 degrees Celsius liquid made up of either lithium potassium or lithiumsodium carbonate sits in a ceramic matrix and functions as the electrolyte in the fuel cell. Natural gas and steam enter on one side and pass through a reformer that converts them into hydrogen and CO2.

On the other side, flue gas – the emissions (including biogenic CO2) which normally enter the atmosphere from Drax’s biomass units – is captured and fed into the cell alongside air from the atmosphere. The CO2and oxygen (O2) pass over the electrode where they form carbonate (CO32-) which is transported across the electrolyte to then react with the hydrogen (H2), creating an electrical charge.

“It’s like combining an open cycle gas turbine (OCGT) with carbon capture,” says Grima. “It has the electrical efficiency of an OCGT. But the difference is it captures CO2 from our biomass units as well as its own CO2.”

Along with capturing and using CO2, the fuel cell also reduces nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions from the flue gas, some of which are destroyed when the O2and CO2 react at the electrode.

From the side of the cell where flue gas enters a CO2-depleted gas is released. On the other side of the cell the by-products are water and CO2.

During a government-supported front end engineering and design (FEED) study starting this spring, this CO2 will also be captured, then fed through a pipeline running from Drax Power Station into the greenhouse of a nearby salad grower. Here it will act to accelerate the growth of tomatoes.

The partnership between Drax, FuelCell Energy, P3P Partners and the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy could provide an additional opportunity for the UK’s biggest renewable power generator to deploy bioenergy carbon capture usage and storage (BECCUS) at scale in the mid 2020s.

From powering space ships in the 70s to offering greenhouse-gas free transport, fuel cells continue to advance. As low-carbon electricity sources become more important they’re set to play a bigger role yet.

Learn more about carbon capture, usage and storage in our series:

Could turning carbon dioxide into fish food feed the future?

17 June 2019

Carbon capture
Fisherman boiling shrimps on board of shrimp boat fishing for shrimps on the North Sea

Reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is one today’s greatest global challenges. But it‘s far from the only issue the world faces. The global population is expected to grow by a third to hit 10 billion by 2050 – an incredible growth that will place huge stress on securing a sustainable source of nutritious, healthy food for future generations.

One UK start-up, Deep Branch Biotechnology, is aiming to tackle both problems with a single solution that utilises captured CO2 emissions to create animal feed protein. In the past, Drax has explored using CO2 captured from its biomass units to help prevent a looming summer beer shortage. Now it’s partnering with Deep Branch to test if captured CO2 can solve some of agriculture’s most-pressing problems.

Broken food chain

The amount of land and resources dedicated to producing animal feed is increasingly unsustainable. A third of all the earth’s cropland is currently used to grow feed crops for livestock, which adds up to more than 90% of all global soy, and 60% of all cereals.

Soy seedlings

“The process of creating the protein we eat on our plates is extremely resource inefficient,” says Peter Rowe, Deep Branch CEO. “It takes about 6 kilograms (kg) of feed to produce one kg of pork. Soy is one of the world’s most widely produced crops but more than 90% of it goes into animal feed.”

It’s not just on land where feed crops are creating problems. Of fish caught around the world, an incredible 25% is processed into fishmeal for the aquaculture, or fish farming, industry. The demand for fishmeal is such that at present it outpaces demand for fish.

Even with an increasing number of people shifting to meat-free diets and more alternatives making headlines, meat production is still expected to double by 2050.

These industries need serious overhauls if they are to sustain into the coming decades. Deep Branch, helped via funding from Innovate UK, is looking to aquaculture as a test bed for sustainable protein production whilst also encouraging CO2 capture.

Turning carbon to carp

The secret behind Deep Branch’s approach to turning emissions into fish food is a strain of bacteria that feeds on CO2.

The partnership will see Deep Branch connect directly to a source of CO2, with the start-up taking up residence in Drax’s carbon capture usage and storage (CCUS) incubator space. Here, flue gas from one of Drax’s biomass power generation units will be fed into Deep Branch’s system, along with hydrogen, enabling a process known as gas fermentation to take place.

“Normally when people think of fermentation, they think about something like wine, where sugar is converted into alcohol with a yeast acting as the biological catalyst,” says Rowe. “Our process, however, uses CO2 and hydrogen instead of sugar. Rather than yeast, our proprietary bacterium acts as the biological catalyst and converts these gases into protein.”

The resulting product is single cell protein, which comes out as a milk-like liquid when harvested. It’s then dried into powder and 70% of what remains are proteins that can be used as a fishmeal replacement.

One of the advantages of Deep Branch’s system is that rather than requiring energy to separate CO2, flue gas can be delivered directly to microbes, which can convert up to 70% of the captured CO2 into proteins. But for such a system to have a real impact it needs to be deployed at scale.

Scaling up

The process has been trialled in labs and proved highly efficient, with ten kg of CO2 producing seven kg of protein. What this new partnership with Drax offers is the opportunity to test Deep Branch’s process and technology at grid-scale. And while Deep Branch is focusing on aquaculture for now, the concept could potentially reach much further through the food chain.

Fish feed

“Because Drax’s biomass units are carbon neutral at the point of generation, the process creates an extremely low-carbon protein,” explains Rowe. “If you divorce the negative environmental impacts of industries like agriculture from its growth then you can provide more whilst impacting less.”

Deployed at global scale the idea of carbon-neutral protein would free up some of the arable land currently being used for soy and other feed crops. It means that as well as cutting the carbon intensity of traditional protein sources, more land would be available for other uses, while helping to halt climate change.

Learn more about carbon capture, usage and storage in our series:

Capturing carbon emissions from the atmosphere could transform these industries

24 April 2019

Carbon capture

Countries, companies and industries around the world are racing to find ways to reduce their emissions. But looking slightly further down the line there is in fact a grander aim: negative emissions.

Negative emissions technologies (NETs) can actually absorb more carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere than they emit, and they’re vitally important for avoiding catastrophic, man-made climate change. Without NETs it could be impossible to achieve the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s ambition of keeping temperatures under 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

One example already being implemented is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). It is what its name suggests. Using technologies to capture and store the CO2 generated during the process of energy generation from biomass or organic materials rather than releasing it into the atmosphere.

BECCS holds vast potential in the electricity generation industry. Drax Power Station is currently piloting one form of this technology on one of its biomass units to capture as much as a tonne of CO2 a day. But if it were deployed across all its biomass units, BECCS technology could make it the world’s first negative emissions power station.

Beyond the power industry, however, there’s scope for growth across other industries once the biomass is sourced sustainably. There are already five sites around the world where BECCS is being trialled and implemented at scale, laying the road to negative emissions.

Storing CO2 from ethanol production in the Illinois Basin

The ethanol production industry is already seeing significant deployment of BECCS, including the largest installation of the technology operating in the world. The Illinois Industrial Carbon Capture and Storage project is part of a corn-to-ethanol plant in the US that has the capacity to capture 1 million tonnes of CO2 every year.

Here, corn is used to create ethanol by fermenting it in an oxygen-deprived environment. This process creates CO2 as a by-product, which is captured and stored permanently in pores within the sandstone of the Illinois Basin under the facility.

Researchers believe with further development the site could capture as much as 250 million tonnes each year.

Norway’s cement challenge  

Concrete is one of the world’s most versatile building materials. As a result it is the second most-consumed material in the world behind water – more than 10 billion tonnes of it is produced every year. However, its key ingredient – cement, which acts as concrete’s binding agent – is made using a hugely carbon-intensive manufacturing process and now accounts for as much as 6% of all global carbon emissions.

The Norcem Cement plant in Brevik, South-East Norway, has been experimenting with using biomass to power the kilns used to create its cement (which must heat ingredients to 1,500 degrees Celsius). Now it’s taking this a step further by becoming part of the country’s ambitious Full Chain CCS project.

The project will see 400,000 tonnes of CO2 captured annually, which will then be transported by ship to a storage site on Norway’s western coast. From here a pipeline will transport the CO2 50 kilometres away and deposit it deep below the North Sea’s bed.

The plan has the potential to work at an even bigger scale. The pipeline will be capable of receiving as much as 4 million tonnes of CO2 per year, meaning it could even import and store carbon from other countries.

Burning waste and growing algae

In a world that seems increasingly unsure how to safely deal with its waste, the idea of incinerating it and making use of the heat this produces seems widely beneficial. But combusting any solid means releasing carbon emissions.

In Japan, however, a biomass-fired waste incineration plant is changing this by being the first in the world to capture its carbon emissions.

To get this project up and running, Toshiba, the firm behind the project, had to overcome unique challenges. For example, waste incineration produces a greater mix of chemicals than in ethanol or power production, including some that are corrosive to the metal pipes normally used in carbon capture.

Now running at commercial scale, the Saga City waste incineration plant isn’t just capturing CO2, it’s also utilising it to cultivate crops at a nearby algae farm. The carbon is being absorbed and used to grow algae for use in commercial scale cosmetic products, such as body and skin lotions.

Carbon isn’t the only thing finding new use at the facility. Reconstituted scrap metal from the plant is being used to make the medals for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

The carbon capture system has been operational since 2016 and is capable of capturing 3,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, but it isn’t the region’s first deployments of BECCS. 

Fully integrating BECCS into biomass power

Nearby, the Mikawa power plant on the Fukuoka Prefecture, is leading the race in Asia to fully integrate carbon capture technology into a biomass power station.

The 50 MW power station successfully piloted carbon capture in 2009 through a partnership with Toshiba. At the time it was powered by coal, however, in 2017, the plant upgraded to a 100% biomass boiler fuelled by palm kernel shells – a waste product from palm oil extraction mills. Now it’s in the process of ramping up its carbon capture capabilities, with a target of being operational in 2020.

The system – which after Drax will be the second plant in the world to capture carbon using 100% biomass feedstock – will have the capacity to capture more than 50% of the biomass plant’s CO2 emissions, or as much as 180,000 tonnes per year. Japan’s government is now supporting efforts to develop CO2 transportation and potential offshore storage solutions for next year.

Pulping wood and growing food

BECCS technology has yet to be deployed in the paper industry to the same extent as in other organic-matter-based industries. But with many pulp and paper mills already using by-products, such as hog fuel, in generating power for their sites, it’s a prime area for BECCS growth.

In Saint-Felicien, Quebec, commercial-scale carbon capture technology is being deployed at a pulp mill run by Resolute Forest Products, and, as of March 2019, had a capacity of capturing 11,000 tonnes of CO2 a year. Rather than storage, however, it supplies the carbon to a cucumber-growing greenhouse next door to the mill, as well as supplying enough warm water to meet 25% of the greenhouses’ heating needs.

Both long established biomass-based industries like ethanol and paper, and new sectors like electricity, are now adopting BECCS technology and driving innovation.

The biomass feedstocks involved in BECCS must, however, be sourced sustainably – or else a positive climate impact could be at the expense of environmental degradation elsewhere. ‘It should be possible to expand biomass supply in a sustainable way,’ found a recent ‘Global biomass markets’ report from Ricardo AEA for the UK’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).

While it’s still a complex technology to deploy, BECCS is increasingly operating at larger scales and growing to the level needed to seriously reduce industrial CO2 emissions and help to combat climate change.

Learn more about carbon capture, usage and storage in our series:

Energy Revolution: A Global Outlook

5 December 2018

Carbon capture

Read the full report [PDF]

The global energy revolution

As a contribution to COP24, this report informs the debate on decarbonising the global energy system, evaluating how rapidly nations are transforming their energy systems, and what lessons can be learned from the leading countries across five energy sectors.

It was commissioned by power utility Drax Group, and delivered independently by researchers from Imperial College London and E4tech.

Clean power

  • Several countries have lowered the carbon content of their electricity by 100 g/kWh over the last decade. The UK is alone in achieving more than
    double this pace, prompted by strong carbon pricing.
  • China is cleaning up its power sector faster than most of Europe, however several Asian countries are moving towards higher-carbon electricity.
  • Germany has added nearly 1 kW of renewable capacity per person over the last decade. Northern Europe leads the way, followed by Japan, the US and China. In absolute terms, China has 2.5 times more renewable capacity than the US.

Fossil fuels

  • Two-fifths of the world’s electricity comes from coal. The share of coal generation is a key driver for the best and worst performing countries in clean power.
  • Coal’s share of electricity generation has fallen by one-fifth in the US and one-sixth in China over the last decade. Denmark and the UK are leading the way. Some major Asian nations are back-sliding.
  • Many European citizens pay out $100 per person per year in fossil fuel subsidies, substantially more than in the US or China. These subsidies are growing in more countries than they are falling.

Electric vehicles

  • In ten countries, more than 1 in 50 new vehicles sold are now electric. China is pushing ahead with nearly 1 in 25 new vehicles being electric and Norway is in a league of its own with 1 in 2 new vehicles now electric, thanks to strong subsidies and wealthy consumers.
  • There are now over 4.5 million electric vehicles worldwide. Two thirds of these are battery electric, one third are plug-in hybrids. China and the US together have two-thirds of the world’s electric vehicles and half of the 300,000 charging points.

Carbon capture and storage

  • Sufficient storage capacity has been identified for global CCS roll-out to meet climate targets, but large-scale CO2 capture only exists in 6 countries.
  • Worldwide, 5 kg of CO2 can be captured per person per year. The planned pipeline of CCS facilities will double this, but much greater scale-up is needed as this represents only one-thousandth of the global average person’s carbon footprint of 5 tonnes per year.

Efficiency

  • Global progress on energy intensity is mixed, as some countries improve efficiency, while others increase consumption as their population become wealthier.
  • Residential and transport changes over the last decade are mostly linked to the global recession and technological improvements, rather than behavioural shift.
  • BRICS countries consume the most energy per $ of output from industry. This is linked to the composition of their industry sectors (i.e. greater manufacturing and mining activity compared to construction and agriculture).

continued … [View PDF]

I. Staffell, M. Jansen, A. Chase, E. Cotton and C. Lewis (2018). Energy Revolution: A Global Outlook. Drax: Selby.

View press release:

UK among world leaders in global energy revolution

Negative emissions techniques and technologies you need to know about

28 November 2018

Carbon capture

Cutting carbon emissions is the headline environmental policy for the 195 countries signed up to the Paris Climate Agreement – and so it should be. Decarbonisation is crucial to keeping global warming below 2oC and avoiding or at least mitigating potentially dire consequences for our planet, its people and biodiversity.

However, centuries of pumping out carbon dioxide (CO2) from factories, vehicles and power plants means it’s not enough just to reduce output. Countries must also work on CO2 removal (CDR) from the atmosphere. Implemented at scale, what’s also known as Greenhouse Gas Removal (GGR) could mean a country or facility removing more CO2 than it emits – effectively giving it negative emissions.

Achieving this is not only advantageous to combating climate change, it’s essential. A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) explores 116 scenarios in which global warming is kept to 1.5 oC of pre-industrial levels (more ambitious than the Paris Agreements 2oC). Of these scenarios, 101 use negative emissions technologies (NETs) at a scale of between 100 to 1,000 gigatonnes* over the 21st century.

Given the scale of the ambition, the task of capturing enough carbon to be truly negative will need to rely on many sources. Here are some of the techniques, technologies, and innovations aiming to push the world towards negative emissions.

  1. Forests

Weyerhaeuser Nursery, Camden, Alabama

CDR doesn’t have to utilise complex tech and chemistry. The planet’s natural carbon cycle already removes and stores huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere – primarily through trees. The world’s forests have absorbed as much as 30% of annual global human-generated CO2 emissions over the last few decades.

Regenerating depleted forests (reforestation), planting new forests (afforestation), and protecting and helping existing forests thrive through active management can all contribute to offsetting emissions.

The IPCC report estimates that reforestations and afforestation could potentially capture 0.5 and 3.6 billion tonnes of CO2 a year at a cost of USD$5 to $50 (£3.90 to £39) per metric tonne.

There are potential drawbacks of extensive afforestation. It could compete with food crops, as well as reducing the reflection of heat and light back into space that arid lands currently offer to prevent global warming.

  1. Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage

Europe’s first BECCS pilot project at Drax Power Station

Biomass on its own is an important fuel source in lowering emissions from industries such as power generation. On one hand, it’s created by organic material, which during its lifetime absorbs carbon from the atmosphere (often enough to offset emissions from transportation and combustion). On another, it creates a sustainable market for forestry products, encouraging landowners to responsibly manage forests, which in turn can lead to growing forests and increased CO2 absorption.

But when combined with carbon capture and storage (CCS or CCUS) technology it becomes a negative carbon emissions process, known as BECCS. Drax is partnering with carbon capture company C-Capture in a £400,000 pilot to develop CCS technology, which will remove a tonne of carbon from its operations a day. Combined with the carbon removed by the forests supplying the biomass, it could turn Drax into the world’s first negative emissions power station.

Beyond just storing the captured carbon underground, however, it can be used to create a range of products, locking in and making use of the carbon for much longer.

The IPCC report estimates between 0.5 and 5 billion metric tonnes of carbon could be captured globally this way at a cost of $100 to $200 (£80-160) per metric tonne.


  1. Increased ‘blue carbon’

Mangrove roots

It’s not only forests of fast-growing pines or eucalyptus that remove CO2 from the atmosphere. In fact, coastal vegetation such as mangroves, salt marshes and sea grasses suck in and store carbon in soil at a greater rate than plants on land. The carbon stored in these waterside ecosystems is known as ‘blue carbon’.

Human encroachment and development on coastlines has depleted these environments. However, efforts are underway to regenerate and expand these hyper-absorbent ecosystems –turning them into carbon sinks that can remove more emissions from the atmosphere than conventional forests. Apple is currently throwing its financial weight behind a mangrove expansion project in Colombia to try and offset its global operations.

  1. Boosting ocean plants’ productivity

Beyond costal mangroves, the ocean is full of plants that use CO2 to photosynthesise – in fact, the oceans are thought to be one of the world’s largest carbon sinks. But there are some people who think we could enhance marine plants’ absorption abilities.

Eelgrass Bed

One such approach involves injecting iron nutrients into the ocean to prompt a bloom in microscopic plants called phytoplankton, which float in the upper part of the ocean absorbing the CO2 absorbed from the atmosphere. When the plants eventually die they then sink trapping the absorbed carbon on the seabed.

An additional positive effect would be an increase in dimethyl sulphide, which marine plants emit. This could alter the reflectivity of clouds that absorb water from the ocean and further act to cool the earth.

  1. Enhanced rock weathering

Plants absorbing CO2 through photosynthesis is the most-commonly known part of the carbon cycle, however, rocks also absorb CO2 as they weather and erode.

The CO2 usually reaches the rock in the form of rain, which absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere as it falls. It then reacts with the rocks, very slowly breaking them down, and forming a bicarbonate that is eventually washed into the ocean, locking the carbon on the seabed.

The problem is it takes a long time. One idea that seeks to use this natural process more effectively is to speed it up by pulverising rocks and spreading the resulting powder over a larger area to absorb more CO2 from rain and air.

Natural rock weathering currently absorbs around 0.3% of global fossil fuel emissions annually, but the IPCC estimates at scale it could capture 2 and 4 billion metric tons at a cost of between $50 and $200 (£39-160) per metric ton. This approach also requires extensive land use and has not been trialled at scale.

  1. Sequestering carbon in soil

Soil is another major carbon sink. Plants and grasses that die and rot store carbon in the soil for long periods. However, modern farming techniques, such as intensive ploughing and fertilisation, causes carbon to be released and oxidised to form CO2.

Adjustments in farming methods could change this and, at scale, make agriculture carbon neutral. Straightforward techniques such as minimising soil disturbance, crop rotation and grassland regeneration could sequester as much as 5 billion tonnes of carbon into the soil annually, according to the IPCC, at potential zero cost.

A challenge to this method is that once soil is saturated it can’t hold any more carbon. That material would also be easily released if methods are not maintained in the future.

  1. Increasing soil carbon with biochar

A way to super-charge how much carbon soil can store is to add a substance called biochar to the earth. A type of charcoal made by burning biomass, such as wood or farm waste, in the absence of oxygen, biochar can increase the amount of carbon locked into the soil for hundreds or thousands of years. It also helps soil retain water, and reduce methane and nitrogen emissions.

Biochar has only been trialled at a small scale but the IPCC estimates that between 0.5 and 2 billion metric tonnes could be captured annually through this means. However, it predicts a cost of between $30 and $120 (£23-94) per metric tonne. Additionally, producing biochar at scale would require large amounts of biomass that must be sustainably sourced.

  1. Direct air capture

CO2 is in the air all around us and so removing it from the atmosphere can effectively take place anywhere. Direct air capture (DAC or DACCS) proposes that the carbon capture and storage technology many power stations are now trialling can be carried out almost anywhere.

Swiss start-up Climeworks is one company attempting to make DAC viable. Its technology works by passing air through a surface that reacts with CO2 to form a compound, but releases the remaining air. The newly formed compound is then heated so the reactive chemical agent can be separated and reused. The CO2 is then stored underground with gas and water where it reacts with basalt and turns to stone in less than two years.

The main challenge for this technique is the cost – between $200 and $600 (£156-468) per metric tonne – and that it requires large amounts of energy, creating further demand for electricity.

One hundred million tonnes

Wood pellet storage domes at Drax Power Station, Selby, North Yorkshire

The primary challenge for negative emission technology as a whole is that so few have actually been implemented at a global scale. However, trials are in motion around in the world, including at Drax, to remove emissions and help limit the effects of climate change.

Even if the UK decarbonises heavily across all sectors of the economy by 2050, there’s still projected to be 130 MtCO2 (million tonnes of carbon dioxide) net emissions. But a Royal Academy/Royal Society report released earlier this year was optimistic. It concluded that the country can become net zero and do its part in mitigating man made climate change – with BECCS identified as the negative emissions technology best suited to take the leading role and at least cost.

Learn more about carbon capture, usage and storage in our series: