Chapter 1 - Intro to Carbon Capture, Processing & Technologies

1.01 Climate Change (14 min.) Sample Lesson
1.02 Carbon Capture (17 min.)
1.03 CO₂ Source vs Purity (13 min.)
1.04 CO₂ Gas Properties & Phase Behaviour (17 min.)

Chapter 2 - Capture Types & Technologies

2.01 Capture Types (29 min.)
2.02 Capture Technologies - Part 1 - Amines (22 min.)
2.03 Capture Technologies - Part 2 - Solvent Process (28 min.)
2.04 Capture Technologies - Part 3 - Degradation & Emissions (11 min.)
2.05 Capture Technologies - Part 4 - Improvements (22 min.)
2.06 Case Study - MEA System Design (15 min.)
2.07 Solids Based Capture - Part 1 (22 min.)
2.08 Solids Based Capture - Part 2 - Low Temp (12 min.)
2.09 Solids Based Capture - Part 3 - High Temp (14 min.)
2.10 Membrane Based Capture (27 min.)
2.11 Other Capture Technologies (9 min.) Quiz: 2.11 Other Capture Technologies

Chapter 3 - CCUS Economics, Compression & Pipelines

3.01 Technology Factors that Affect Cost (25 min.)
3.02 CO₂ Compression (26 min.)
3.03 CO₂ Pipelines (14 min.)
3.04 CO₂ Utilization (2 min.)
3.05 Projects & Costs (21 min.)
3.06 CCS Cost Factors (23 min.)
3.07 CCS Costs vs Technology (13 min.) Quiz: 3.07 CCS Costs vs Technology

Carbon Capture, Processing & Technologies / Chapter 1 - Intro to Carbon Capture, Processing & Technologies

Lesson 1.01 Climate Change

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Transcript

01. Lesson 1.01: Climate Change 02. About Wayne Monnery 03. Agenda 04. Climate Change 05. Mitigating Climate Change 06. Climate Change Mitigation

01. Lesson 1.01: Climate Change

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whenever you're watching this. Welcome to Carbon Capture course here at SAGA Wisdom. This one happens to be an overview course. It's Carbon Capture Surface Facilities Technologies.

02. About Wayne Monnery

I am Wayne Monnery. A little background about myself. I'm been in the oil and gas industry for about 30 years, all the way from doing engineering work on paper to spending lots of time out in the field troubleshooting. I have a PhD in chemical engineering and I got that from the University of Calgary. I've done a little bit of teaching there. I don't do a whole lot anymore, but I am an adjunct professor still there. Like other PhDs, I've published stuff, both highly kind of academic, but I've also published lots of industrial type work, probably best known for some separator papers in '93 and '94 for any of those who might have read that. Most of my work has been in North America, but I have done some work in South America and Europe. I did some work in Serbia of all places. So who knows? It can be anywhere.

03. Agenda

What are we going to talk about today? This is our agenda, as you can see. So it is an overview course, just so that you know. I'm not going to do any deep dives into technology. I'm really trying to present you with what your technology options are, what some of the risks might be, and so on. We'll start easy. We're going to break it up into lessons here.
Some of the lessons are, we're going to talk about climate change basics and obviously where CO₂ fits in.
We're going to go from there into CO₂ sources as another lesson, because that becomes an extremely important parameter in terms of what technology I might pick. And you have to pay attention because there is a quiz. And one of the questions on there is something to do with what is the first most important issue in technology choice? And so I just gave you a hint right there.
We're then going to talk about capture types. And IPCC actually has captured types and we're going to follow along with them, a graphic that I borrowed from them.
And then after capture types, we'll talk about the technologies themselves. And that's going to split this course into 2 big pieces. So the first course here is probably going to be between 3 and 4 hours and it's going to stop after we talk about the first technology. And then we'll capture, sorry, pun wasn't intended, but we'll go after and discuss the next technologies in the second part of the course. And that part we'll also talk about some CO₂ projects and things that are always on everybody's mind: how much is this going to cost me? So we've got lots of cost data.
And then we'll end up with just some key learnings. And sometimes there's a question and answer period. That depends on how we do this with SAGA. So there's the possibility of running a live question and answer.

04. Climate Change

All right, well, let's start with Lesson 1. Let's get into it and talk about climate change. I'm sure everybody kind of has an idea of what's going on with climate change anyway. But this is a theory based on the idea that carbon dioxide, specifically, in our atmosphere plays a predominant role in our climate due to it being a so-called greenhouse gas. So really what we have is an energy balance, a radiative energy balance on the planet. And people have said, well, what's going on? As we emit so-called greenhouse gas up into the atmosphere, that we, of course, will get a higher temperature. And this is due to the effect of... basically what happens is we get the sun giving us radiation onto the planet and then the earth's albedo effect, it's called, we reflect long wave infrared radiation back off. Now when that albedo effect occurs, it's like standing in front of a fire. Everybody knows, you can't really see that infrared heat, but it's there, I can feel it. And so that infrared heat's going off up into the atmosphere and anything that's a greenhouse gas will absorb some of that. So I'm sure you've heard all that before. And of course, the theory is that if we increase the concentration of greenhouse gases, they'll absorb more radiation, this long-wave infrared radiation. And if we do that, the temperature has to go up and the whole system finds a new equilibrium. This theory originally, actually it was around for quite a while. It was originated by somebody who's actually pretty famous in chemical engineering, kinetic studies, Svante Arrhenius, at the turn of the last century came up with this. It kind of stayed dormant for a while and then it started to catch on a little bit in the 60s, but most particularly in the 70s. Now, there is a carbon cycle here as well. We know we have a water cycle and people are very familiar with that. Basically, I get precipitation. It evaporates. It goes around in a circle. And carbon, by the way, in the long term, there is a cycle there too. As we produce oil and gas, for example, what are we producing? We're producing carbon that anaerobically was degraded millions of years ago, so we're just producing it again.
OK, so as you can see, there's some animation in this slide and it's discussing some of the things I just mentioned that we've got greenhouse gas increasing. And the theory is that humans are causing this increase in greenhouse gas. And no matter what side of this you're on, it's actually true. Some people want to blame volcanoes. And volcanoes, yes, there's definitely some greenhouse gas and sulfur dioxide coming off there but volcanoes have always existed. So any steady increase in this is really caused by human beings. There are other greenhouse gases. Some of note; methane is a big one of note. And in the oil and gas industry, of course, we're going after methane a lot as well. Methane sometimes it's humorous because people talk about methane coming from other sources, like cows and things like that. So, methane is an important greenhouse gas as well. However, one thing I do want to say here is water is actually the most important greenhouse gas. We don't really talk about that very much. We don't hear about it very much because it's all about carbon and that means it's going to be about CO₂ and methane but the water cycle is extremely important in all of this and water is something like 80% of greenhouse gases, 80 - 90%, the rest being CO₂ and methane. When you see the higher percentages of CO₂ and methane, that's without water in the mix.

05. Mitigating Climate Change

So, if we believe that this is going to be a bit of an issue for us, we have to talk about mitigation of climate change, which is going to mean how do we deal with the extra carbon or CO₂ getting up into the atmosphere? And there are several ways of looking at mitigating climate change.
One way, and it's a fairly obvious way and it's been going on for a while is energy efficiency improvements. One really obvious example of that is our cars, right. We've gotten a lot better fuel economy in the last 15 - 20 years and it's kind of driven by this. So, that's energy efficiency improvements.
What else is there? We could switch to less carbon intensive fuels, hence the hydrogen economy, which is the extreme of where you get no carbon coming off. But one easier example and we're going to see a little bit of carbon intensity, some statistics coming up on a slide, is to move away from obviously things like coal. Coal takes you towards oil. Oil takes you towards natural gas. And really what we're interested in is the hydrogen to carbon ratio. And the hydrogen to carbon ratio is, as it goes up, it's a less carbon intensive fuel.
What else can we do? Well, one of the big emitters, of course, is power, the power industry worldwide. So we could go to nuclear power. There are some folks who don't think that's a really great answer, but it is a way of mitigating climate change because nuclear power doesn't emit any greenhouse gas.
Another one, of course is, and this is well known, renewable energy sources: solar, wind power. Those are definitely ways we can go. And the only real issue I guess there and this is where they get picked on is there's an efficiency issue with renewables. And so they're a good choice from the point of view of carbon emission, but we're going to have to deal with how do we get them to be more efficient all the time because it's a time issue. The other part of the efficiency with them is that they can take up a lot of land space, so it's really difficult to scale them. When I look at solar, for example, and I see it on somebody's roof in their home, I think that's great. So distributed solar works for me. But if you say I want to power all of Alberta or Canada on solar, that's where I find that the scalability breaks down a little bit. But it is an option for mitigating climate change.
What else can we do? Well, we can say, OK, we are emitting carbon. Maybe what we should do is capture it and do something with it. And that's part of what this course is going to be about today, which is carbon capture and storage or carbon capture utilization and storage. Now we've said, OK, there is carbon dioxide out there, we're going to do something with it. Try and remove it maybe before it gets into the atmosphere or so-called direct air capture where it's in the atmosphere and we're going to capture it.

06. Climate Change Mitigation

So where are we? We are just above 400 ppm. When I did the slide, it was about 400. Today it's probably 410 - 415 ppm of actual CO₂. This is measured just off Hawaii as one of the main places it's measured. So 400 ppm, pre-industrial it was more like something like 270. And so you hear a lot about, OK, we're almost double. And there's also a lot of work that goes on about what will happen if we double the amount of CO₂ by the end of this century, 2100 rather. If we believe that this is going to cause a large increase in temperature and we want to mitigate that, of course, we need to reduce the carbon emissions. Now, you'll see there that global emissions need to be reduced by 70%. That's a huge range, right? But the thing is, the reason the range is so large is it really depends, IPCC as an organization and everybody knows what that is I hope, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, United Nations organization, they have several scenarios, OK. And based on different scenarios, some of them say, OK, we assume a reasonably good amount of mitigation therefore we won't have to reduce the carbon that much. There's another one, business as usual. There's another one where we do absolutely nothing and we just burn coal like mad, like we do now to make power. And so then that takes you to the top of the range where, OK, now you're at 70%. So that explains just why there's a huge range. And this is 7 - 70% of what? Below 2001 values. And again, those different ranges or scenarios that the ranges are based on, those are called stabilization profiles.
OK, so despite a drop of cost in recent years, renewable is still pretty expensive. We usually need some sort of government subsidies for those. But again, that's where a lot of people are looking and the price has dropped by something like 90%. So we're definitely in the right direction. I do believe in prudent application of them. Like I mentioned a minute ago, I think solar is great on the tops of roofs, but I drove through a huge solar farm in the Salton Sea and wow, it was dozens of acres of solar panels and it wasn't the greatest place to be driving through. They break and then they don't get maintained. So, I think it's prudent application of anything. Renewables, as I mentioned, there's intermittency and that drops the efficiency. Land use, I just mentioned that. And sometimes what happens is because we use a lot of land, there might be environmental impacts of plant or animal species. I'm not against it, just saying that it's not the panacea just yet.
OK, so scale up I mentioned, that's probably one of the issues related and because of land use and environmental impact.
All right folks, that's it for this lesson. This is the basics of climate change. And we're going to move on to the next lesson which is we're going to start in actually on carbon capture.