Ireland Touts Undersea Carbon Capture and Storage Facility

Written by Martin Lynch, European News Editor for Industrial Info (Galway, Ireland)--Gas Networks Ireland (Cork, Ireland) has proposed a plan to construct a carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility off the southern coast of Ireland that could become the first project of its kind in Europe.

The company, which owns, operates, builds and maintains the Irish natural gas network, said the project would cost more than one billion euro ($1.2 billion) but would benefit from being able to use the existing pipe network that has been used to pump gas from the Kinsale gas field for 30 years. A feasibility study is underway.

It would involve capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from two gas-fired plants nearby--Whitegate and Aghada--before pumping it to the Kinsale field, which will be depleted in a few years, the company explained. The field would have a storage capacity of up to 300 million tonnes. Whitegate and Aghada have generating capacities of 430 megawatts (MW) and 1,007 MW and in 2016 emitted 3.1 million tonnes and 1.8 million tonnes of CO2, respectively. The facility could also be used to store emissions from waste incinerator plants but is too far to store emissions from Ireland's biggest industrial emitter, the Moneypoint coal-fired plant.

Brendan Murphy, commercial and regulatory manager at Gas Networks Ireland, speaking to the Sunday Times newspaper said that there are "unique factors at Kinsale that could make [CCS] viable where it isn't in other places. The beauty of it is you can use the existing pipe network, which has been used to take the gas from the field for the past 30 years."

He added: "You also have a gas field that will have to be decommissioned at cost, so you can save that money. Most of the fields being looked at elsewhere for storing gas require CO2 to be injected at very high pressure, so the CO2 has to be compressed to liquid form and pumped in. But the Kinsale field is a relatively rare low-pressure field, so you can leave the CO2 as a gas."

The company wants to secure the role of gas in the country's attempts to lower its emissions and sees CCS storage as vital to making gas the leading low-carbon option as more renewables come online.

"We need to reduce emissions by 80% by 2050," Murphy said, "and we've been thinking about the role gas will play and what we can do to get to the point where gas is an endgame solution."

It has been a turbulent time for CCS investment in Europe in recent years, with major projects in Norway and the U.K. losing financing. In 2015 the U.K. government was promising £1 billion ($1.5 billion) in promised funding to two CCS projects--White Rose and Peterhead--but by the end of the year it pulled that support. For additional information, see December 2, 2015, article - U.K. Cancels Funding for Carbon Capture Projects.

Last week, Industrial Info reported that oil and gas majors Statoil ASA (NYSE:STO) (Stavangar, Norway), Royal Dutch Shell plc (NYSE:RDS-A) (The Hague, Netherlands) and Total S.A. (NYSE:TOT) (Paris, France) had announced plans to jointly develop a large-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) project using depleted gas fields on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS). For additional information, see October 9, 2017, article - Statoil, Shell, Total Team Up for Carbon Storage.

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