Agenda 30th June: The larger Picture
08:30 The larger picture
08:30 Welcome remarks
Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum and Energy; William Christensen (10 minutes)
Welcoming remarks.
US Department of Energy (5 minutes); Brad Crabtree
genda 30th June: The larger Picture
08:45 The US Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act: Implications for CCUS US IIJA Overview, Hydrogen hubs, and CO2 utilization projects, Industrial Demos; Noah Deich, DOE
09:35 Norwegian activities on infrastructure and hydrogen
10:25 Funding opportunities
10:25 Status and discussions around CETP and ACT4; Aage Stangeland; RCN, Mark Ackiewicz; DOE
SUMMARY OF SESSION
William Christensen, the Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum and Energy, welcomed the delegates to Norway, Bergen, and the meeting. After a brief history of the bilateral cooperation between USA and Norway, in which William emphasised the functions and achievements of the agreement, we learned about the Norwegian CCS strategy. The strategy has four important pillars – research, pilot testing, full scale chain, and implementing CCS in Europe. The Longship project forms the corner stone of the full chain development, including capture of CO2 from a cement plant and a waste-to-energy plant and storage in the North Sea by the Northern Lights Joint Venture. The latter holds the first exploitation licence for CO2 storage in Norwegian waters, and has been followed by others, including a licence in the Barents Sea. Before wishing the delegates a good meeting, William ended with remarks on the market failures of CCS and the drawback of being a first mover.
Brad Crabtree, US Department of Energy, followed up with opening remarks from the US delegation, emphasizing on CCUS development recent years. Of particular importance to CCUS development in the US is the 45Q tax credit. Negotiations are ongoing to extend the bill for 10 years, meaning that industry will have until 2032 to start projects. The credits will be increased to $85/t CO2 stored in aquifers and to $60/t for CO2going to EOR (at the CDR workshop Tuesday we heard of $180/t CO2 fort Direct Air capture). The new legislation, in which 45Q will be part of the investments and infrastructure bill, will be decided in July and will leverage private investments in CCUS. Brad ended with encouraging words on the urgency of progress for CCUS and how it now seems to be rolling, and how the two countries can work together to inspire others to follow.
Noah Deich presented US initiatives at larger scale, including industrial CCUS demonstrations and Hydrogen hubs.
The US Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has secured significant funding for CCUS, as much as $10+ billion in new carbon management funding over 5 years. Dan Hancu, US DOE, gave some details of the plans. For capture these include
· Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs: $3.5 billion and DAC Technology Prize Competition: $115 million
· Carbon Capture Demonstrations and Large Pilots: $3.5 billion
· Front End Engineering studies for Carbon Capture Technology, $ 100 million
· Hydrogen Hubs, $ 8 billion
Dan also referred to an overwhelming response to requests for information on how to develop point source capture and DAC hubs.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will lead to a significant number of CO2 Transport Front-End Engineering Design (FEED) Studies, as shown by Sarah Leung in her presentation. For example, the length of CO2 pipelines may grow from today’s 5,000 miles to 11,000 miles in 2030 and 13,000+ miles of trunk pipelines and 52,000+ miles of spur pipelines by 2050. A workshop was held with the objective to improving understanding about the challenges and opportunities in meeting future carbon transport and storage goals, including repurposing wells and pipelines. US DOE is developing a Carbon Matchmaker, an online information resource to connect users across the carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR) supply chains. Carbon Matchmaker is intended to help facilitate regional carbon management by allowing sources, end-users, and other stakeholders to self-identify and align potential needs in specific geographic areas within the United States. It will come online soon.
The final presentation from the US in this session was by Darin Damiani, who gave more details on how the funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is planned used for CO2 storage, including $2.5 billion for the Carbon Storage Validation and Testing and $310 million for the Carbon Utilization Program. In addition comes activities related to critical minerals and materials with $140 million allocated to Rare Earth Element Demonstration and $127 million for Rare Earth Mineral Security. A central element of the US CO2 storage program has been the Carbon Storage Assurance Facility Enterprise (CarbonSAFE), which includes new or expanded large-scale commercialization carbon sequestration facilities. CarbonSAFE is also open for hub development. Darin mentioned the SRMS classification framework before ending by showing how the total US CO2 injectivity is expected to grow from 5 million ton CO2/year in 2025 to 450 million CO2/year in 2040.
The presentations on the Norwegian greater picture was opened by William Christensen, OED, and Anita Fossdal, Enova. William started by describing the Norwegian Roadmap for hydrogen, which has a 2025 milestone stating that the Government will cooperate with the private sector to enable the development of:
• Five maritime hydrogen hubs
• One-to-two industrial projects with associated production
• Five-to-ten pilot projects for the development and demonstration of new and more cost-efficient hydrogen solutions and technologies
Additional ambitions are:
• The Government will accommodate for the establishment of economically viable production of blue hydrogen through the state-owned enterprise Gassco, by granting areas for CO2-storage.
• The Government will accommodate for the production of hydrogen with low- to zero emissions to cover the national demand in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
William continued with listing several funding mechanisms, funds spent, and some important projects on Hydrogen.
Anita followed up with thoughts and considerations for hydrogen markets. There is a market potential, particularly in industry and the maritime sector, but barriers to large scale deployment of hydrogen production include high price of input factors for hydrogen production; low efficiency / loss of energy in during hydrogen production; expensive transport and (intermediate) storage; lack of value chain for transport and storage of carbon dioxide (blue hydrogen); and partly lacking and expensive end-user technology. The willingness to pay varies significantly among potential customers.
Jørild Svalestuen, Gassnova, stated that development of industrial clusters is important to reduce costs through common infrastructure. Six industrial clusters are in planning in Norway; CO2-hub North, Mid-Norway Cluster, Haugalandet, Eyde-Cluster, Grenland Cluster and Øra Cluster. Between them, they cover all major industries in Norway. A network of waste incineration plants in Norway have been established and it is called “Climate Cure” for Waste-to-Energy in Norway.
The Waste-to-Energy (WtE) plants have a significant amount of biogenic CO2, thus contributing to «negative CO2-emissions» / Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR). The facilities see regulations and incentives for CDR as an important part of the CCUS business models.
Capturing CO2 at industrial clusters will need storage opportunities. Vaibhava Singh, Equinor, presented some thoughts Equinor has on carbon transport and storage. Hydrogen with CCS is part of the strategy. Using 2035 as a target year, Vaibhava showed that Equinor aims at a transport and storage capacity of 15-30 million ton CO2/year, which is expected to be > 25% of the European market, and 3-5 clean hydrogen projects, >10 % of the European market. Equinor are involved in several projects, in USA as well as in Europe. Details of the Tri-State Clean Energy hub was shown. Equinor has long experience with CCS, from the early days of Sleipner to TCM and Northern Lights JV. This includes obtaining the first exploitation license in Norway, as well as CO2 transport by ships and pipeline. Vaibhava concluded that cost reductions when scaling up the capacity of pipelines could be a factor of 6 when going from 2 to 20 million ton/year.
Assurance and risk management was presented by Erik Mathias Sørhaug from DNV -an independent assurance and risk management company. Three concepts for CO2 ship transport have been studied: medium pressure (15-20 barg, -30Co), low pressure (7-10 barg, -50 Co), and high pressure (40-50 barg, >0 Co). The few ships that operate today are medium pressure with small volumes that operates in an industrial market. As demand for transport of larger CO2 quantities is expected to increase the ships need to be scaled up in size. Relevant conditions could be 7 to 8 barg and temperature of -50 to -550C. However, there are pros and cons for all three pressure conditions. Choosing the right shipping solutions include:
• Finding the cheapest solution, including transporting and cost considerations for the whole value chain (not only the ships).
• Consider reducing pressures, but this lead increasing cost for liquefaction and conditioning/re-gasing
• Increasing pressures.
An ISO report on CO2 transport by ships is under development, with DNV as chair.
DNV has developed several industry guidance documents for CO2 transport in pipelines. They clearly detail the specific issues that need to be addressed for CCS projects. These documents include recommended practices, service specification documents, guidance documents, and data from Joint Industry Projects (JIPs).
At the following Q&A session it was commented on how a video showing fracturing of a CO2 pipeline had been used in communication campaigns. The aim of the video is to present research and testing results but the communication led to public doubts on CCS safety. When communicating to the public we must be careful and ensure the full story gets out.
The last item in this session was the funding opportunities within ACT4 and European Clean Energy Transition Partnership (CETP). Aage Stangeland, RCN, started with an overview of ACT and informed of the new ACT4 Call with budget allocations from Germany, USA, India, Province of Alberta, and Norway. He went on the present the new CETP and invited to a discussion led by Mark Ackiewicz, US DOE. Questions posed to the audience were:
How can we mobilize US and Norwegian researchers and companies to form strong consortia and submit interesting applications to the ACT4 call?
What are the most important topics that are suitable for US-Norwegian collaboration under the ACT4 call?
Should we let ACT be absorbed by CETP, or should we continue with ACT and establish a collaboration with CETP?
• What actions are needed to make sure CETP becomes relevant for US-Norwegian collaboration?
ACT is seen as a very important tool for multi-lateral collaboration within RD&D. The new partnership, CETP, opens for new possibilities but it will be important to continue ACT as a part of CETP. The collaboration within ACT has proven to be fruitful and it is important to build on this instead of starting from scratch within the new CETP platform.
All ACT projects have been asked to set up Consortium Agreements that are signed by all partners. This has been challenging for many projects due to different legal cultures in Europe and USA. In the upcoming ACT4 call this will potentially become easier because the procedures for establishing Consortium Agreements have been softened. The ACT funding agencies will also team up with new projects at an early stage to guide the project partners in their process with the Consortium Agreement
Knowledge sharing activities are important to disseminate results from ACT projects to a broad audience. Matchmaking activities to bring researchers together are also needed to ensure that best possible applications are submitted to the ACT calls. The audience encouraged the ACT funding agencies to prioritize matchmaking and knowledge sharing events.