Incorporating CCS into the power industry will see the melding of practices and cultures from two quite different industries with different drivers and different approaches to project development. The power industry will need to embrace the chemical industry and the chemical industry will need to adapt to the requirements of the power industry if this marriage is to work.

Carbon capture involves chemical processes that are largely new to the power industry. Processes that use catalysts and strange solutions that absorb and then liberate gases. Words like strippers, absorbers and distillation columns enter the vocabulary. Equipment filled with strange plates or shapes that just sit there seemingly doing nothing enters the flow sheet. Liquids with strange names such as MEA and MDEA are circulated and as if by some black art flue gases go in one end and clean CO₂ comes out the other.

As an engineering manager out of the chemicals and oil and gas industry stewarding the development of the world’s first low emissions coal-fired power project for me the CO₂ was the product and electricity was the by-product. However my power generation colleagues reminded me that the product was actually electricity and that the CO₂ was now a by-product. A by-product that was no longer a waste material. The power producer now had another customer the storage site. Both customers now had to be satisfied at the same time. The CO₂ could not just be vented when the storage facility had a problem or when the specification limits were transgressed and the intermediate storage (the pipeline) was full. The power producer now had this fickle set of chemical and physical reactions driven by a foreign language called mass transfer thwarting his ability to do what he knows best and that is to make and sell electricity.

The chemical industry produces products than can be stored. It uses catch-up capacity. It stores its overs to make up for its unders.

Unfortunately, as we all know, electricity does not behave that way. When the grid frequency drops and the dispatch goes out for support the power station ramps up and its chemical systems need to respond.

Unfortunately chemical processes are driven by mass transfer and chemical reactions which are in turn driven by concentration differences that are severely affected by liquid and gas flow rates. Response to change is slow. These complexities are largely not seen in combustion reactions and steam generation.

Time lags particularly in absorption/stripping systems are typically in the order of minutes rather than seconds. In addition placing a number of chemical processes in series such as desulphurisation, absorption and desorption or liquefaction and separation some of which may involve multiple steps and overall time lags of 15 to 30 minutes can result. Dynamic response in a facility with CCS is therefore not only far more complex but also makes being anything other than a base load producer much more challenging. Producers who can meet these challenges will stand to make a lot of money in a deregulated electricity market in a carbon constrained world.

As a producer of a relatively low priced commodity, competitiveness comes from driving down operating costs, maximising uptime and managing assets more effectively than your competitor. Being able to operate with minimum manning and having well developed asset management systems and tools is key to being able to repeatedly demonstrate availability figures in the low to mid 90 per cent. These are the bench marks set by the power industry. So all of a sudden you throw in these cumbersome, complex, operator hungry, chemical processes that need to be shut down every year or so for inspections and so called turnarounds and you have totally upset the apple cart. It is little wonder that the power industry is looking at CCS in trepidation.

If this marriage is to work the chemical industry will need to design its processes and to develop technologies that are far more responsive, less operator intensive, require far less off-line maintenance and are generally far more forgiving.

However there is an upside, a silver lining. The chemicals industry is used to dealing with complexity. It has developed systems and processes to manage this complexity. Amongst a number of initiatives is a different project development approach. Systems and project processes such as concept generation, technology selection, basic engineering, FEED packages and a concept called front-end loading is used to manage complexity. Because chemical processes are complex, driven by unit operations and linked together often in an interdependent manner there is the need for more definition earlier.

This is the essence of front-end loading. Here technology selection, option generation, execution planning and incorporating site factors as well as a number of value improvement processes delivers the result. This typically involves many more options, sub options, combinations and permutations and a greater level of basic engineering to enable decisions to be made than is necessary in a power project; and then significantly more development often in the form of a FEED package is required before detailed engineering can commence.

Developing CCS projects and generating electricity in a carbon constrained world will be complicated by chemical processes that will be a challenge to the traditional power generator. The power generator will need to learn a new language and adapt to concepts and approaches foreign to him. Equally, the chemical engineers designing chemical processing systems for integration into a power station will need to learn how to achieve stratospheric heights in availabilities, make them significantly more responsive and able to be run by an operator and a security guard on the night shift.

In the end cross cultural fertilisation can be a good thing. It can spurn innovation and real advancement provided that both sides embrace the challenges and make the necessary changes. Let’s hope we are all up to the task.