Refrigeration’s contribution to CCS

Led by IFP (France), the European research project Cocate - which brings together 8 other research and industrial partners worldwide for a budget of 4.5 million € - tackles the problems of rolling out a shared transportation infrastructure capable of connecting geological storage sites with various medium size CO2-emitting industrial facilities located within close geographical proximity. While major industrial facilities can be fitted with their own CO2 capture and transport installations, this does not apply to units that emit less CO2 and for which the investment required would be uneconomic. They must pool the CO2 capture and transportation systems in order to cut costs and to make carbon capture and storage (CCS) an affordable technology. The Le Havre region and the Port of Rotterdam have been selected as test sites for the research work. The transportation infrastructure being considered includes two types of network: a local low-pressure network to collect the flue gases emitted by various Le Havre industrial companies and transport it to various capture centres; and a high-pressure network to transport the captured CO2 to the Port of Rotterdam, for storage in depleted North Sea oil and gas fields. Regarding CO2 transport, various scenarios using refrigeration technologies will be considered: pipeline transport (CO2 in supercritical state above 74 bars) or transport by ship (CO2 transported in refrigerated liquid form [-50°C, 7 bar or -30°C, 15 bar]). Refrigeration, which is also used in CO2 capture technologies (see Newsletterof the IIR No. 35), is to play an important role in CCS which, according to IPCC, could "contribute 15-55% to the cumulative climate change mitigation effort worldwide until 2100".