“It’s a waste of time,” a partly jesting Mitsubishi manager, Iijima Masaki, said of the growing concentration of carbon-tech in the North Sea.
“(If you want to save the environment), we should focus on carbon capture where two-thirds of world oil and gas is, in the Middle East,” Masaki said, hinting that efforts should be made to transport carbon-dioxide to the Persian Gulf by ship, along with CCS and injection technology.
Matsaki’s company is one of a few with “carbon-capture technology ready”. At the invitation of Shell and Statoil, his company has begun work toward solving the problems of CCS’s cost.
Aker Kvaerner is another supplier hoping to do the same. At a recent CCS carbon capture coference in Oslo hosted by government and partly organized by Statoil, an unnamed Aker Kvaerner executive materialized on Big Screen to ask for help, just as GE’s hydrogen-natural-gas turbine builder, Scott Hoyte, wrapped up his panel discussion.
“If we build a hydrogen-gas trubine, we have no market without CCS,” Hoyte said, shortly before expressing his willingness to help Aker Kvaerner. Hoyte added that he supported stately funds to help the deployment of CCS, as was the pattern in Norway.
Aker Kvaerner, meanwhile, has spent $10 million since 1991 on capture ideas and the company speaker said a full-scale, carbon-capture pilot could cost $75 million, making it hard to find willing industrial partners. The company's Just Catch concept for the planned heat-power plant at the Mongstad refinery includes a biofuels component for 20-percent more electricity output.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, GE boss Jeff Immelt arrived in Oslo and was interviewed by newspaper _Aftenposten_. He was quoted as saying “Saving the environment is profitable”, but the Norwegian press asked no questions about turbines technology for Aker Kvaerner.
Immelt reportedly added that while wind energy is good anywhere, carbon capture is of special intrest to Northern Europe, where carbon storage projects and opportunity for cleaner coal-firing abound.
In Norway, Shell and Statoil have concentrated Mitsubishi, Fluor and a Canadian company to work on carbon capture technologies. On June 22, GE customers Vattenfall, Statoil, Shell, Hydro and DONG were invited to “share the knowledge” in exchange for incubating capital at the newly designated European CO2 Test Centre Mongstad.
Under a system for technology demos set up by Norwegian state entity Gassnova, companies are invited to financially support CCS-worthy suppliers, with the patent going to the supplier and the knowledge to the energy company. The Norwegian government will kick in €250 million to match the industry funding.
Similarly, in Australia, coal miner Rio Tinto and oil supermajor BP will receive A$1 billion from the Australian government over 14 years for reservoir and pipeline research.
“We need to develop new business concepts, and we need to develop new markets which no one has seen to date,” said Bjoern-Erik Haugan, director of Gassnova’s Centre for Sustainable Gas Technologies.
An emissions trading conference in Copenhagen this September could determine whether CCS projects — with their vast potential to alter the carbon supply and hence its price — join the range of projects under the United Nation’s so-called Clean Development Mechanism, where projects that spare the environment generate tradeable emissions credits.
The Norwegian government this week said it will have to buy carbon-emissions credits in developing countries as well as support industry at home to meet its Kyoto pollution-reduction targets by 2012.
There’s corresponding haste in devleoping countries to generate tradeable emissions credits countries like Norway can buy via clean, CDM projects.
Scnadivaian Oil & Gas
By WILLILAM STOICHEVSKI
