User:Meghnar11/sandbox

Project Proposal
Our group (Lorenzo, Areidy, Sophia, and I) want to edit the Carbon Capture and Storage page. Specifically we will be researching and updating section 7 (Example CCS Projects). This list is outdated and missing projects. We will definitely add the Gorgon, Quest, Weyburn, Petra Nova, and White Rose projects as well as any others that we deem fit to be edited with the given time limit. Furthermore, to avoid making the article longer than it needs to be, larger projects will be linked to its own Wikipedia page that we create. I specifically will be focusing on the Petra Nova project located in Texas.

Petra Nova
The Petra Nova project is a billion dollar endeavour taken upon by NRG Energy and JP Nippon to retrofit their jointly owned W.A Parish coal-fired power plant with post-combustion carbon capture. The plant, which is located in Thompsons, Texas (just outside of Houston), entered commercial service in 1977, and carbon capture began operation on January 10, 2017. The plant generates 240 MW and 90% of the CO2 (or 1.4 million tonnes) is captured per year. The carbon dioxide captured (99% purity) from the power plant is compressed and piped about 82 miles to West Ranch Oil Field, Texas, where it will be used for enhanced oil recovery. The field has a capacity of 60 million barrels of oil and is expected to increase oil production by a factor of 506. This project is expected to run for at least another 20 years.

Quest Carbon Capture and Storage Project
Quest Carbon Capture and Storage Project captures and store underground one million tonnes of CO2 emissions per year. The capture unit is located at the Scotford Upgrader in Alberta, Canada, where hydrogen is produced to upgrade bitumen from oil sands into synthetic crude oil.

Gorgon Carbon Dioxide Injection Project
The Gorgon Carbon Dioxide Injection Project is part of the Gorgon Project, the world's largest natural gas project. The Gorgon Project, located on Barrow Island in Western Australia, includes a liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant, a domestic gas plant, and a Carbon Dioxide Injection Project.

The initial carbon dioxide injections are planned to take place by the end of 2017. Once launched, the Gorgon Carbon Dioxide Injection Project will be the world’s largest CO2 injection plant, with an ability to store up to 4 million tons of CO2 per year – approximately 120 million tons over the project’s lifetime, and 40 percent of total Gorgon Project emissions.

Weyburn Project
The objective of the Weyburn Project is to increase oil production and extend the oil field’s lifetime through Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) by injecting the captured CO2 from the Dakota Gasification Company's Great Plains Synfuels Plant in North Dakota and SaskPower’s coal-fired Boundary Dam Power Station in Saskatchewan, Canada into the Weyburn oilfields.

Overview
The Petra Nova project is a billion dollar endeavor taken upon by NRG Energy and JP Nippon to retrofit their jointly owned W.A Parish coal-fired power plant with post-combustion carbon capture. The plant, which is located in Thompsons, Texas (just outside of Houston), entered commercial service in 1977, and carbon capture began operation on January 10, 2017. The plant generates 240 MW and 90% of the CO2 (or 1.4 million tonnes) is captured per year. The carbon dioxide captured (99% purity) from the power plant is compressed and piped about 82 miles to West Ranch Oil Field, Texas, where it will be used for enhanced oil recovery. The field has a capacity of 60 million barrels of oil and is expected to increase oil production by a factor of 50. This project is expected to run for at least another 20 years. To satisfy the Clean Coal Power initiative requirements, The Texas Bureau of Economic Geology has put in place a monitoring plan to keep track of the injection and movement of the CO2 beneath the surface and in the rock structures at West Ranch.

Technology
The carbon capture unit is retrofit onto the coal-fired power plant and uses an amine-based absorption system, or the KM CDR Process® (Kansai Mitsubishi Carbon Dioxide Recovery). This process was developed by Mitsubishi and Kansai Electric Power and utilizes a high performing proprietary solvent called KS-1™. The CO2 is removed from the exhaust gas through a basic absorber-stripper system. The gaseous CO2 is then compressed to a supercritical liquid. The CO2 leaving the carbon capture plant is over 99% pure and is sent 82 miles through 12 inch diameter pipes to their end location of the West Ranch oil field where it is used for enhanced oil recovery .The carbon dioxide from the Petra Nova Initiative will eventually end up in into sandstone in the Frio Formation of West Ranch oil field. It will remain about 5,000 feet underground over a 4,000 acre area.

Economics
The Petra Nova carbon capture plant cost about $1 billion and received about a $190 million grant from the U.S. Government under the Clean Coal Initiative and a $250 million loan from the Japanese government. The enhanced oil recovery increases the production of West Ranch from 300 to 15,000 barrels per day and was expected to be very economical. However, when the project was first proposed, oil prices were very high (at $100 per barrel) and assumed that they would not drop. The current oil prices are about $50 per barrel and, thus, creates an economic drawback for Petra Nova.

Overview
Quest Carbon Capture and Storage Project captures and store underground one million tonnes of CO2 emissions per year. The capture unit is located at the Scotford Upgrader in Alberta, Canada, where hydrogen is produced to upgrade bitumen from oil sands into synthetic crude oil.

Technology
Mined bitumen extracted from Alberta’s oil sands is a heavy oil that needs an upgrading process before being delivered to refineries and transformed into marketable products. The upgrading process is energy intensive and requires hydrogen that is produced from a steam methane reformer. Making hydrogen creates carbon dioxide that at Quest is captured and separated from nitrogen through an absorption amine technology process. Captured CO2 is subsequently compressed and transported for 64 km where CO2 is stored two kilometers underground into a saline aquifer.

Current status
The project began capture CO2 in November 2015. Quest Carbon Capture and Storage Project at Scotford has the capacity to capture approximately one-third of CO2 emissions from the Scotford Upgrader. The cumulative stored volume is expected to be greater than 27 million tonnes of CO2 over the anticipated 25 year life of the Scotford Upgrader.

Overview
The Gorgon Carbon Dioxide Injection Project is part of the Gorgon Project, the world's largest natural gas project. The Gorgon Project, located on Barrow Island in Western Australia, includes a liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant, a domestic gas plant, and a Carbon Dioxide Injection Project.

The initial carbon dioxide injections are planned to take place by the end of 2017. Once launched, the Gorgon Carbon Dioxide Injection Project will be the world’s largest CO2 injection plant, with an ability to store up to 4 million tons of CO2 per year – approximately 120 million tons over the project’s lifetime, and 40 percent of total Gorgon Project emissions.

Technology
Gas is supplied from two world-class gas fields namely, Gorgon field that contains on average 14% of naturally occurring reservoir CO2, and Jansz-lo field that contains less than 1% CO2. Reservoir CO2 is extracted from natural gas as a part of normal gas-processing operations. During the liquefaction process, natural gas is cooled to -162° C. CO2 freezes at this temperature, so it needs to be separated from the natural gas stream prior to gas processing and liquefaction. Separation is performed using a basic absorber and stripper system and an amine-based solvent.

The Gorgon Carbon Dioxide Injection Project will compress and pipe separated CO2 to nine injection wells where it will be subsequently injected into the Dupuy Formation. Once the CO2 is injected, it will migrate through the Dupuy Formation until it remains trapped. The top of the Dupuy Formation reservoir is located approximately 2300 m below Barrow Island and is overlain by a thick shale cap-rock seal. The pressure in the reservoir will cause the injected CO2 to behave as a supercritical fluid with behavior of both a liquid and a gas. The reservoir CO2 will become trapped in the reservoir through a combination of residual saturation trapping and by dissolution into the waters in the formation.

Environmental impacts
The carbon dioxide injection plant is located on Barrow Island, a Class A nature reserve. Therefore, the development of the processing plant had to undergo very strict environmental regulations. The Joint Venture established expert panels to protect the biodiversity of the island and surrounding marine environment. To ensure that the Dupuy Formation was suitable for underground injection of reservoir carbon dioxide, the Gorgon Joint Venture undertook additional drilling, well tests, and seismic surveys prior to making the final investment decision. An on-going monitoring program, including observation wells and seismic surveys, will assist in managing the performance of the injected carbon dioxide in the Dupuy Formation.

Overview
The White Rose Carbon Capture and Storage project is a proposed oxy-fuel coal-fired power plant near the Drax power station in North Yorkshire, United Kingdom. It was proposed in 2012 by Capture Power Limited (in partnership with National Grid). This project would have been the first coal-fired power plant to demonstrate the use of oxy-fuel technology for low-carbon electricity at a competitive cost. The proposed 426 MW plant was expected to send 2 Mt CO2/year to an offshore saline aquifer, achieving 90% capture. Due to the cancellation of key subsidies and withdrawal of major commercial investments, the White Rose Carbon Capture and Storage project appears to have stalled, with no new updates on the project since 2016.

History
During the early 2010’s, there was interest in the White Rose project taking part of the new governmental subsidies, most especially the CCS Commercialisation Programme and the EU New Entrant Reserve (NER) 300, both of which aimed at funding low-carbon energy projects to scale commercially. In 2014, the CCS Commercialisation Programme awarded the White Rose project with a 2-year Front End Engineering Design (FEED) Programme contract, which would finalize the engineering and financials of the project Also at this time, the White Rose project also received EUR 300 million from the European Commission. However, in November 2015, six months before the funding was supposed to be received, the UK government announced the end of the CCS commercialization Programme due to the UK Treasury’s concerns of high consumer costs and taxpayer money funding CCS before it reached its cost-efficiency. The Treasury cites the fact that no examples of the technology working after attempting to fund the idea in 2011 and in 2012. Unfortunately, since the cancellation, there have been no new updates from the White Rose project, even though the operation was expected to start in 2020.

Industrial Collaborations
Capture Power Limited is composed of three major European companies: Alstom, Drax Group, and The BOC Group. Due to reduced renewable energy subsidies from the UK government, Drax announced the withdrawal of its investments to begin after the Front End Engineering Design (FEED) studies were completed in 2015, but promised to continue providing land as well as site services and infrastructure. The BOC Group would be responsible for the delivery and maintenance of the air separation unit for the coal-fired power plant. Finally, National Grid would construct the carbon capture pipeline and storage facilities in a collaborate effort to provide infrastructure for surrounding carbon capture projects.

Overview
The Alberta Carbon Trunk Line (ACTL) is a 240 km pipeline in its construction stages that will collect excess CO2 from Alberta, Canada’s Industrial Heartland and transport it to various oil reservoirs around Alberta, Canada for enhanced oil recovery applications. Pioneered by Enhance Energy Inc., the ACTL will source its CO2 from a fertilizer manufacturing plant in Redwater, AL, and the North West Redwater Partnership bitumen upgrading plant using gasification. It will initially funnel the collected CO2 to Clive, AL, a field discovered in the 1950s and currently produces about 300 barrels per day.

Expected Specifications of Captured CO2
The ACTL is expected to be the world’s largest carbon capture and storage project. It will store 14.6 million tonnes of CO2 per year, six times more than the Weyburn project in Saskatchewan. Initially, the project should collect and transport 4,600 - 5,100 tonnes of CO2 per day and is expected to expand to 40,000 tonnes of CO2 per day.

Timeline
Plans for the ACTL began in 2004, but were put on hold due to the Great Recession in 2008. However, the ACTL was restarted after the recession with a license for construction and operation issued in April 2011. The ACTL was originally planned to start production in 2013, and delayed to 2015, and then finally delayed further. The pipeline is currently in its final stage of production as of November 2016. The ACTL has planned for CO2 injection to begin in early 2018.

Economics
The project has been estimated to cost CAN$1.2 billion but will find approximately CAN$558 million from several energy funds and carbon capture technology initiatives. Over 15 years, the Alberta province will be funding the project with CAN$495 million from the Alberta CCS Fund. The Canadian government is giving a total of CAN$63 million: CAN$30 million from the Clean Energy Fund and CAN$33 million from ecoENERGY Technology Initiative.

Weyburn (editing existing page; original page shown with edits made)
The Weyburn-Midale Carbon Dioxide Project (or IEA GHG Weyburn-Midale CO2 Monitoring and Storage Project) is, a carbon capture and storage project located in Midale, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Introduction
The objective of the Weyburn Project is to increase oil production and extend the oil field’s lifetime through Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) by injecting the captured CO2 from the Dakota Gasification Company's Great Plains Synfuels Plant in North Dakota and SaskPower’s coal-fired Boundary Dam Power Station in Saskatchewan, Canada into the Weyburn oilfields. While increasing the oil production, CO2 is being sequestered into the depleted fields reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

The IEAGHG Weyburn-Midale CO2 Monitoring and Storage Project is an international collaborative scientific study to assess the technical feasibility of CO2 storage in geological formations with a focus on oil reservoirs. The research project accesses data from the actual CO2-enhanced oil recovery operations in the Weyburn oil field, and after the year 2005 from the adjacent Midale field.

Description of Technology
Dakota Gasification Company's Great Plains Synfuels Plant in Beulah, North Dakota captures approximately 8,500 tons of CO2  per day[xi]. Operating at full capacity, this plant can capture up to two-thirds of the ‘readily available CO2’ with a 95 percent purity level. This CO2 is then transported from Beulah, North Dakota to Saskatchewan, Canada through a 320 km long pipeline The Weyburn oil field has a total of 720 wells.The high-pressure CO2 is pumped into 37 injection wells (to a depth of 1500m, helping oil to flow towards 145 active producer wells” . Of the 8,500 tons of CO2 transported from the Synfuels plant, about 6,500 tons in injected into the Weyburn oilfield and the rest is sent to the adjacent Midale oilfield for injection.

The temperature and pressure conditions in combination with the oil composition of the Weyburn oil reservoir, allow CO2 to act like a solvent when injected at high pressures. ‘The CO2 (95% pure with 1% Hydrogen sulphide (H2S)) mixes with the oil, causing it to swell and become less viscous. The swelling forces oil out of the pores in the rocks, so that it can flow easily. For every 8,000 cubic feet of CO2 injected, approximately one barrel of oil is recovered and oil production in Weyburn is increased by two to three barrels for every ton of injected CO2. Injection of water and CO2 through the injection wells is alternated to push the released oil towards producer wells. The small portion of CO2 that manages to be pumped back out with the oil through the producer wells is separated from the oil, recycled, compressed and re-injected along with gas from the pipeline’. As of 2008, it is estimated that enhanced oil recovery will allow for the extraction of an additional 155 million gross barrels of incremental oil by 2035 and the storage capacity of the Weyburn oil field will lead to the geologic storage of 30 million tons of captured CO2 over 30 years.

Economics and Policy
Cenovus operates the Weyburn facility on behalf of our 24 partners. The Weyburn CO2 –EOR project is estimated to have cost $80 million. The U.S. and Canadian governments jointly pledged an additional $5.2 million in funding in July 2010. The U.S. Department of Energy provided $3 million and the Canadian Government provided $2.2 million. According to the IEA, geological storage has the potential to store safely massive amounts of CO2, and it is a technology that is ready and available to be implemented on a wide scale. Geological storage in combination with EOR has proven to be economical and effective on a large commercial scale.

Current Status
“Today, about 60 percent of the Weyburn field is under CO2 flood. The Weyburn project is Canada’s largest CO2 enhanced oil recovery operation and is recognized as the world’s largest geological CO2 storage project. From 2000 to 2012, Weyburn was also the site of the International Energy Agency (IEA) Greenhouse Gas Weyburn-Midale CO2 Monitoring and Storage Project, an example of global collaboration and a model for academics, governments and researchers from around the world to learn about CO2 injection and storage”. “In February of 2017, the Weyburn project reached an important milestone by safely injecting approximately 30 million tons of CO2 underground since we first started using CO2 flood technology in 2000. This effective storage in greenhouse gas emissions is equal to taking more than six million cars off the road for an entire year. Approximately two million tons of new CO2 are being injected and stored at Weyburn every year”.