Though carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies in industries have emerged from the collaboration of governments and various entities responsible for reducing carbon emissions, the development of these technologies is too slow to ensure their contribution in climate change mitigation, says a new report from Reportlinker.
While there is a growing political interest in reducing carbon emissions, governments have failed to adopt sufficient policies or supporting ways to improvise existing technologies. Without concrete initiatives and robust policies to attract private investments, governments will not be able to create economic or market conditions aligned with the vision to broaden CCS demonstration and deployment.
The research says CCS technology and deployment should be given equal importance as other clean energy technologies such as renewable energy, and in terms of global climate change policy. The report also highlights emerging trends such as those to develop more specialized enzymes and membranes to be utilized for CCS to meet specific and complex needs of the industry such as sequestration of industrial carbon emission and neutralizing CO2 to create commercial byproducts.
CCS technologies applied in industries will greatly contribute to reducing carbon emission by 2050. CCS is widely established in the oil and gas and chemical industries, but its application in the heavy industries such as steel, aluminum and cement manufacturing, are currently at pilot stage.
Organizations, government bodies and private entities worldwide are developing techniques, materials and methods to capture CO2 in high volumes. One of the effective ways to capture CO2 is to integrate or retrofit the carbon capture unit into a new or existing power plant respectively, the report said.
Carbon capture and storage Involves capturing streams of CO2 from fuel combustion in power plants or industrial processes and injecting them at high pressure into deep geological formations for permanent underground storage.
Initiatives from countries in Asia, especially China, show an increased interest in developing carbon capture solutions due to the rapid industrialization, which incur high demands of energy that resulted in power plant expansions. Ultra-supercritical technology and integrated gasification combined cycle are some of the other areas that demand development due to increasing demands for global electricity, the report said.
The International Energy Agency has adopted seven key actions until 2020 to drive private financing of CCS projects. They include: implementation of policies that encourage storage exploration, characterization and development for CCS projects; development of national laws and regulations as well as provisions for multilateral finance that effectively require newly built fossil-fuel power generation to be CCS-ready; prove capture systems at pilot scale in industrial applications where CO2 capture has not yet been demonstrated; significantly increase efforts to improve understanding of CCS technology and the importance of its deployment among the public and stakeholders; introduce incentives to reduce the cost of electricity from power plants equipped with capture through continued technology development and use of highest possible efficiency power generation cycles; and Encourage efficient development of CO2 transport infrastructure by anticipating locations of future demand centers and future volumes of CO2.
Other technical procedures adopted include pre-combustion capture, post-combustion capture, oxy-fuel combustion, chemical looping and other techniques such as using permeable membranes, customized solvents and ionic liquids that reduce the emission of carbon dioxide in industrial processes.