Carbon Sequestration in South Africa for our coal generated electricity

South Africa uses coal to generate electricity (Eskom), produce fuels like diesel and crude oil (Sasol), a multitude of synthetic chemicals and metallurigical processing.  It is a cheap fossil fuel and available right on our door step.  We have so much of it that we even export around 28% to the foreign market.  Coal drives quite a large economy on it's own and this is one of the reasons, up until the last few years, that no other energy alternatives were seen as favourable or invested in.  Now since coal with be with us for quite a few more decades, spewing carbon dioxide without limit into the atmosphere, solutions will need to be found to bring the carbon dioxide emissions from this source down.

Nothing has changed in the last few decades, instead the usage of coal has risen exponentially due to South Africa's economic growth and the rising the export price.  However, there are technologies available that can be researched further and implemented but need the right conditions to do so.  The fact that the large industries emitting carbon into the atmosphere by burning this fossil fuel and the customers of the generated energy do not pay a cent towards these emissions, means inherently that there is no need to pour money into researching Carbon Capture and Storage technologies (CCS).


But what is available under the umbrella of CCS technology?  The Department of Energy in the US has poured approximately $6,5 billion in the last 30 years researching and testing this technology of capturing carbon dioxide and storing or sequestering it in underground porous rock formations.  The petroleum industry (international) has been injecting carbon dioxide into depleted oil fields and using it to force trapped oil to the surface for more than four decades.  A good example of this is the Canadian petroleum company Cenovus Energy.  Since 2000 around 20 million metric tons of CO2 has been captured form a North Dakota plant that turns coal into synthetic natural gas and stores it in a depleted oil patch.  No leaks have been documented at this site and the risks of a catastrophic leak is extremely low.  Smaller, regular leaking is still a possibility at some sites where the rock is brittle and faulted.  One of the most stable sites is the Sleipner gas field in the North Sea, where the Norwegian oil company Statoil, has been injecting millions of tons of CO2 into a brine saturated sandstone layer about a kilometre below the seabed.  These deep saline aquafiers, like the one under the North Sea and the US, can hold more than a thousand years of worth of carbon emissions from power plants in the US alone.  Other types of rocks also have the potential as a carbon sink.  So instead of storing CO2, volcanic basalt converts the gas to a form of carbonate rock - thus eliminating the risk of escaping gas.

All of the above technologies capture CO2 either by extracting the impurities from natural gas or the conversion of coal to other chemicals.  Capturing CO2 from a coal fired power plant is a totally different story. Trying to capture CO2 from a complex combination of stack gases is an uphill and very expensive task, which the power companies generally have no incentive to carry out.  Different technologies have been developed to make carbon capture more efficient and cheaper such as to gasify the coal before burning it.  This technology is being used at a new plant in the US which was designed with carbon capture in mind.  But this won't work on existing power plants who burn crushed coal.  One option is to burn the coal in pure oxygen instead of air which produces a simpler flue gas from which to extract the carbon.  This technology is still under development and hasn't been put into use at a power plant yet due to the prevailing global political climate in most of the countries using coal fired power plants.  China is making huge investments to clean up their air especially with all their power utilities using coal.  The first power plant in China designed to capture carbon is due for completion in 2016 - the project called GreenGen will capture 80% of it's emissions.

The above technologies have the promise of delivering big emission cuts quickly, which are sorely needed if are we to keep to the agreed emissions budget set out by the International Panel of Climate Change to keep temperature rise below the 2 degrees Celsius.  The impact of CCS is huge and has the potential of cutting carbon emissions by approximately 80% within the next 40 years.  But to get this going we need global regulation and incentives (carbon trading is one) to produce innovative and progressively cheaper technologies for cleaner air and less carbon emissions.

And this market incentive is coming to South Africa soon, as soon as 2015!  The proposed carbon tax and National Trading Scheme is being implemented for industry from 2015.  The demand for carbon offsets is there, the supply is lagging behind though.  A formal framework is being developed currently for the agricultural sector with carbon credits to be traded via the Gold Standard.  This standard as well as other schemes such as the Clean Development Mechanism and the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) within the local National Trading Scheme will be used for the carbon offsets within industry.  These regulations and markets will reduce the carbon footprint of our electricity and other carbon intensive resources dramatically through the use of CCS technologies, which will trickle down to our products and services.  This is has long been called for as South Africa has the dirtiest electricity in the world which affects market access of our products and services globally.