Engaging Energy

With the big nuclear announcement now out of the way for the UK the nascent UK CCS sector is hoping to get some kind of caffine jolt to wake it up.

The competition to get 4 pilot plants up and running has gone off the boil. Big players have dropped out and the anticipated cross-Europe rush to start burying CO2 has lost some momentum. Lets look at why.

Demand
The recession has hit demand. No doubt about it. UK manufacturing (what was left of it) has gone into hibernation and is not expected to get back to 2007 levels for another 2 or even 3 years. That means the forward demand curves have all been shifted by up to 5 years backwards from where they were in 2008. This really works against the shorter lead times in building new coal, compared with nuclear. The big wind projects that have already been approved, but are waiting for finance or grid connections, have been given £1.3bn in loan guarentees and a new planning regime to work under, further eroding the argument for new coal with CCS as a stop gap until the baseload new nuclear is online. DECC has ruled out any new coal without CCS.
Simply put, why try and prove up the new CCS systems to plug a supply gap that is no longer really there when the proven wind and nuclear options will provide much, if not most, of the mid-term replacement capacity ?
This is very much a UK specific situation and the case for CCS in the UK, to my mind, hinges on quick deployment. Any delays will reduce the potential for a self-sustaining CCS industry in the UK.
From this perspective it looks like new gas-powered peaking plants (or possibly biomass) will be needed to bridge the gap between baseload nuclear and intermittent wind, unless the UK can raise its efficiency substantially over the next 5 years or so.

Enhanced Oil/Gas Recovery
One of the big supporting economic arguments for developing CCS in the UK is its potential to replace the oil and gas industries as a major technology and skills exporter. I think that this is a justified argument as far as it goes. Having worked offshore myself I can see most of the skills being transferable between the two industries and there are a lot of workers looking to CCS as a way to sustain their livelihoods until oil and gas are no longer a mass market source of energy.
One of the ways that oil companies in the US and Canada have been coupling the two industries is by Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). Pump CO2 down into the oil reservoir and the additional pressure and viscosity drop (increased runniness of the oil) increase total recovery. The amount of the increase is very dependent on the age of the reservoir and its extraction history. For example a brand new oil field that has CO2 pumped into it from its very first production could give up as much as 50% more oil than without the addition of CO2. Older fields that have had a prior history of water injection may only give up an additional 10% or so.
This is a problem for the UK. Most of the North Sea fields are old meaning that the application of CO2 for EOR is limited. That means that returns are limited in both time and amount, which in turn means that the majors don’t see the 20-30 year profit lines they need in order to support their administrative and development burdens. The mid-tier and junior oil companies were excluded from the UK’s competition by the requirement to prove that finance was available for full development of the pilot plants and allied storage sites.
So the big guys are too flabby to be able to operate CCS at a profit in UK waters and the smaller guys can’t finance it. Bit of a hitch there.

There is a slightly bigger issue with CO2-EOR. Well spacing. Where Canada and the US (and Saudi, and others) have onshore oil fields where well spacing can be very close and access is not a major issue, the North Sea is not a location that allows close well spacing. This will push EOR to the limits technically and it will not be as effective as in onshore oil fields. Developing the new technologies in this challenging environment would be worth it for a permanent industry, the way we saw North Sea oil in the 70s as providing a new frontier, but not for an industry that has only ever been seen as a stop-gap we have to question what that new frontier is for when considering CO2-EOR and CCS together. Investing in an industry that will migrate away from the UK within a generation, or possibly two at the outside, doesn’t seem like a sound long-term strategy to me.

Intellectual Property and Licensing
If CCS is to be implemented in the North Sea, with or without EOR, the current oil and gas fields are the logical place to start. That means using IP from the oil and gas companies to fast-track development. Unfortunately the mechanisms for doing this are not yet in place. Likewise licensing is only just getting beaten into shape after the recent EU directives to allow CO2 storage under the seabed. Previously it would have been considered as the dumping of waste at sea.
So while those things are eminently do-able, they take time. They will be challenged and discussed, and re-drafted. Go around that loop a couple of times and you’ve lost a year to bureaucracy. That essential quick deployment doesn’t look so achievable and the investment risk escalates. The investors get more and more nervous and we see a situation where even the syndicates left in the UK’s competition start to ask whether its worth carrying on.

So, while I’m sure we will see a demo plant or two on the east coast of the UK in 5-10 years time, I’m starting to doubt whether the North Sea will be centre of a new industry. If I were an investor looking at CCS, I’d be looking at countries that are wedded to coal and that had large onshore sedimentary basins (for example USA, Canada, China, Germany, Poland & Australia, possibly South Africa). I would not be looking at countries that have mulitple energy sources, those with a big commitment to nuclear or those without large onshore sedimentary basins (for example the UK, Norway, Japan, France, Benelux, South Korea).

Update
The new UK Energy Bill 2009 (read on the 19th Nov 2009) includes enabling legislation for CCS in the UK. It allows financial aid for CCS development, without specifying limits, and it provides for DECC to provide regulation for the industry. So either Ed Milliband reads this blog and his officials at DECC are really quick off the mark or I wasn’t the only one to notice that things had gone a bit quiet. I’m not taking bets on the former.