Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is a technology that is ready to be implemented to reduce the impact of greenhouse emissions and to reduce global warming. Carbon dioxide is captured at the point source then transported and mostly stored permanently in geological formations, preventing its release to the atmosphere.
More than six billion tonnes of CO2 will have to be transported from the CO2 sources to storage sites by 2050 to meet the requirements of the International Energy Agency (the 2- degree scenario), requiring large investments also in transportation infrastructure.
Injecting CO2 downhole is not a new process requiring new technology. The oil and gas industry has been doing this since the 1960s, when high-pressure CO2 was used for enhanced oil recovery.
Independent of the technology used for the capture, the CO2 needs to be conditioned before it can be transported and injected into selected reservoirs. Steps of purification and compression are always needed, and different impurities will be present depending on the CO2 source. In general transport can be done in liquid (example shipping) or dense phase (example pipelines).
Even though first projects have been commissioned there are no industry-wide agreed specifications for the treated CO2. Allowed contaminant concentrations will affect design considerations and employed technologies. In fact, the purification effort will vary from project to project.
We know for certain, that the impurities will change the thermodynamic/physical behaviour of the CO2 and some impurities will need to be removed or dealt with in transport/injection.
In this work we show the impact of removing impurities during purification versus dealing with them in the transportation. We will use a “backwards approach’ (i.e. starting from the today required specifications- which are various) to identify which contaminants are difficult to remove. A trade-off and determining an acceptable level of accuracy is required to minimise costs- a qualitative analysis will be presented.
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