Green Light Sought for First Gas-Fired Carbon Capture Plant

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Written by Martin Lynch, European News Editor for Industrial Info (Galway, Ireland) - Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE:RDS.A) (The Hague, Netherlands) and SSE plc (Perth, Scotland) have lodged a planning application with Aberdeenshire council in Scotland to build what would be the world's first commercial scale gas-fired carbon capture and storage (CCS) project.

The Peterhead project is a 340-megawatt (MW) post-combustion capture plant retrofitted to part of an existing 1,180 MW Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) power station at Peterhead, Scotland. As the world's first full-scale gas CCS project, the goal at Peterhead will be to capture up to 10 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and transport it by pipeline offshore for long-term storage deep under the North Sea.

Heading up the Peterhead CCS project, Shell's Bill Spence told media: "Submitting the onshore environmental statement and planning application is the culmination of a huge amount of technical and design work by the whole Peterhead project team over the last year, informed by all of the feedback we have received through our three phases of public consultation. We are pleased to have reached this milestone and are grateful to the local community for the level of interest and engagement we have seen."

The U.K. government has been actively backing two advanced CCS projects: Peterhead and White Rose. It has already supplied front end engineering and design (FEED) contract funding for both projects, worth around €125 million ($134 million). The White Rose Project is an oxyfuel capture project at a proposed new 426 MW co-firing plant next to the giant, Drax coal-fired power plant in Selby, North Yorkshire. Both projects are in the running for the government's €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) CCS Commercialisation Competition Fund. For additional information, see July 14, 2014, article - €300 Million Boost for U.K. Carbon Capture.

There was more good news for CCS last week when the Scottish and U.K. governments agreed to provide £4.2 million ($6.2 million) for industrial research and feasibility work for a proposed full--chain 570 MW CCS coal-gasification power station located in Grangemouth, Scotland. Seattle-based Summit Power Group will use the money to undertake "substantial industrial research and feasibility studies" with the goal of designing, siting, financing, and building their proposed Caledonia Clean Energy Project.

Scottish Energy Minister, Fergus Ewing, said: "Carbon Capture and Storage has the potential to be one of the most cost effective technologies for decarbonisation of the U.K.'s power and industrial sectors, as well as those of economies worldwide. CCS can remove carbon dioxide emissions created by the combustion of fossil fuels in power stations and in a variety of industrial processes and transport it for safe permanent storage deep underground. In the power sector, CCS can contribute significantly to the diversity and security of electricity supply, and also has a unique role to play in providing a continuing supply of flexible fossil fuel capacity that is able to respond to demand in the way that other low carbon technologies are not able to".

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