Alberta's CCEMC Releases Annual Report

EDMONTON – The Alberta-based Climate Change and Emissions Management (CCEMC) Corporation released its 2012/2013 annual report that features 12 new renewable energy and energy efficiency projects. In total, the CCEMC now supports 51 clean tech projects with $212.8 million in committed funding. More

Illinois CCS Update

In an update on its carbon capture project at an ethanol plant near Decatur, Illinois, Archer Daniels Midland Co. says it has captured 685,000 metric tons of carbon emissions and stored them underground storage in the past two years. Carbon dioxide injections began in November 2011 at a rate of about 1,000 tons a month and are expected to continue through next year when the project is expected to reach the permitted level of 1 million tones. 

The project at the Decatur plant is among the largest CCS experiments in the country. The purpose is to test the storage potential of the Mount Simon Sandstone and the integrity of the overlying sealant rocks. Decatur was initially selected in October 2009 for the DOE Phase 1 research and development grants. Following successful completion of the Phase 1 activities, it was identified as one of the most promising industrial CCS projects through a competitive process and entered into Phase 2 with additional funding to begin design, construction, and operation.

Drilling began in February 2009 and a successful injection with a rate of 1000 tons per day was achieved in September 2009. 3D seismic surveys of the injection zone were completed in March 2010 in preparation for Phase 2.

Construction activities began at Decatur on August 26, 2011 with injection commencing in November 2011. As of April 2012, the project has successfully stored over 110,000 tons of CO2. In September 2012, the DOE marked 2 major milestones for the Decatur CCS project: The construction on the project’s storage facility, as well as the public opening of the National Sequestration Education Center. In November 2012 Decatur project completed its first year of CO2 injection operations with a total of 317,000 tons having been buried at a rate of 1,100 tons/day.

The target formation, the Mount Simon Sandstone, was selected as the optimum saline sink because of its widespread nature and immediately overlying Eau Claire shale seal. The Mount Simon Sandstone also underlies one of the largest concentrations of coal fired power plants in the world. This makes the Mount Simon Sandstone one of the most significant carbon storage resources in the United States.

Archer Daniels Midland (June 2010) was selected to receive an additional $99 million in federal aid to help fund a second carbon sequestration project for which the company is awaiting regulatory approval. The goal is to store 1 million tons of CO2 per year for five years. The company hopes to begin the second project in early 2015.

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Using CO2 to Produce Geothermal Energy

SAN FRANCISCO - Researchers are developing a new kind of geothermal power plant that will lock away unwanted carbon dioxide (CO2) underground and use it as a tool to boost electric power generation by at least 10 times compared to conventional geothermal power.

The technology for this design already exists in different industries, and the researchers, led by Tom Buscheck, earth scientist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, are hopeful that their new approach to the technology will expand the use of geothermal energy in the U.S. far beyond the small handful of states that can take advantage of it now. Heat Mining Company, LLC, a startup spun off from the University of Minnesota, expects to have an operational project based on an earlier form of this new approach in 2016.

At the American Geophysical Union meeting on Friday, Dec. 13, Buscheck and his colleagues fromThe Ohio State University, the University of Minnesota and Lawrence Livermore, will debut an expanded version of the design and explain the role that this new approach to geothermal energy production and grid-scale energy storage can have in addressing climate change.

The new power plant design resembles a cross between a geothermal plant and the Large Hadron Collider: it features a network of subsurface concentric rings of horizontal wells inside which CO2, nitrogen and water circulate to draw heat from deep below ground up to the surface, where it can be used to turn turbines and generate electricity.

"This well arrangement encircles the injected fluids with a subsurface hydraulic dam, functioning much like a hydroelectric dam. The intent is to recover the maximum energy benefit from fluid injection operations, a major improvement over conventional geothermal power systems," Buscheck noted.

The design contrasts with conventional geothermal plants in a number of important ways, explained study co-principal investigator Jeffrey Bielicki, assistant professor of energy policy in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geodetic Engineering at The Ohio State University.

"Typical geothermal power plants tap into hot water that is deep underground,pull the heat off the hot water, use that heat to generate electricity and then return the cooler water back to the deep subsurface. Here the water is partly replaced with CO2 and/or another fluid," he said.

"Tt that there are benefits to using CO2, because it mines heat from the subsurface more efficiently than water," he continued."This combined approach (originally developed by Martin Saar at the University of Minnesota) can be at least twice as efficient as conventional geothermal approaches, and expand the reach of geothermal energy in the United States to include most states west of the Mississippi River."

The research team used computer simulations to design the system. In the simulations, a system of four concentric rings of horizontal wells about three miles below ground, with the outer ring being a little more than 10 miles in diameter, produced as much as a half a gigawatt of electrical power - an amount comparable to a medium-sized coal-fired power plant, and more than 10 times bigger than the 38 megawatts produced by the average geothermal plant in the U.S.

The simulations also revealed that a plant of this design might sequester as much as 15 million tons of CO2 per year, which is roughly equivalent to the amount produced by three medium-sized coal-fired power plants in that time.

"One of our key objectives when we began developing the CO2 plume geothermal technology was to find a way to help make CO2 storage cost effective while expanding the use of geothermal energy," said Jimmy Randolph, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Minnesota.

During the past year,  Buscheck added another gas - nitrogen - to the mix, resulting in a design that he and his colleagues believe will enable highly efficient energy storage at an unprecedented magnitude (at least hundreds of gigawatt hours) and unprecedented duration (days to months), provide operational flexibility, and lower the cost of renewable power generation.

"Nitrogen has several advantages," Buscheck explained. "It can be separated from air at lower cost than captured CO2, it's plentiful, it's not corrosive and will not react with the geologic formation in which it is being injected. And because nitrogen is readily available, it can be injected selectively. Thus, much of the energy required to drive the hot fluids out of the deep subsurface to surface power plants can be shifted in time to coincide with minimum power demand or when there is a surplus of renewable power on the electricity grid.

The distribution of stored nitrogen in the underground geothermal reservoir system is shown after 10 years of energy storage and production operations.

"Because we are storing energy in the form of pressurized fluids, we can further improve on this concept by selectively producing hot fluids when power demand is high, as well as reduce or stop that production when power demand is low. What makes this concept transformational is that we can deliver renewable energy to customers when it is needed, rather than when the wind happens to be blowing, or when spring thaw causes the greatest runoff."

The technology could possibly be used to expand the use of geothermal energy around the country. Right now, most geothermal power plants are in California and Nevada, where an especially strong geothermal gradient heats water underground. But the new design is so much more efficient at extracting heat that even smaller-scale "hotspots" throughout the western U.S. could generate power. (The eastern U.S. is mostly devoid of even small hotspots, so geothermal power would still be limited to a few particularly active areas such as West Virginia, Bielicki said.)

Another caveat: the geothermal plant would probably have to be connected to a large CO2 source, such as a coal-fired power plant, which was scrubbing the CO2 from its own emissions. That connection would likely be made by pipeline. Buscheck added, however, that a pilot plant based on this design could initially be powered solely by nitrogen injection, in order to prove the economic viability of using CO2. The study also showed that this design can work effectively with or without CO2, broadening where this approach could be deployed. The research team is currently working on more detailed computer model simulations and economic analyses for specific geologic settings in the U.S.

Co-authors on the presentation included Mingjie Chen, Yue Hao, Yunwei Sun, all of Lawrence Livermore. Work at the University of Minnesota and The Ohio State University is funded by the National Science Foundation, while work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. 

Source: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

EPA Issues Final Rule for CO2 Storage

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued a final rule governing the geologic sequestration of carbon dioxide. Under the new rule, captured CO2 injected into wells that meet the conditions established for that purpose will not be subject to EPA's regulations for hazardous waste. In addition, the EPA will exempt CO2 injected for enhanced oil recovery from hazardous waste regulations. The rule will take effect 60 days after it is published in the Federal Register. Members of the public and interested parties have 75 days to comment on the guidance. More

Update - C02 Emissions by Large Corporations

According to a Reuters report published this week, the majority of large global corporations that regularly report their annual greenhouse gas emissions are still releasing unsustainable levels of carbon dioxide and are not setting their emissions targets and reduction policies on science-based thresholds. The report was based on a study by the U.S.-based Climate Counts, an organization that measures the role corporations play on climate. The research used data from 100 companies in ten different sectors. More

Ocean Floor CO2 Storage Sites Identified

A British research team at the University of Southampton team reportedly has investigated the properties of CO2 and created global maps of the ocean floor to determine where the greenhouse gas could be safely stored.  By estimating temperatures in the upper ocean crust, the team was able to identify where it may be possible to store large volumes of CO2 in the basalts in the stable liquid form. Among the five suitable regions are sites off the coast of Australia, Japan, Siberia, South Africa and Bermuda, ranging in size from ½ million square kilometres to almost four million square kilometres. More