![]() The first major project, Porthos (Port of Rotterdam CO2 Transport Hub and Offshore Storage) was given the green light in the third quarter of 2023. When will carbon capture and storage be operational in the Netherlands? However, it is important to permanently monitor how CO2 will behave there under pressure. ![]() TNO has conducted extensive research into carbon storage in depleted gas fields under the North Sea and concluded that it can be done safely. Globally accumulated experience of storage in saline aquifers shows that this is also a safe method of storage. Storage in depleted gas fields has the advantage that the storage itself has been proven to be safe. However, previous pilot projects met with public resistance, and because storage capacity under the North Sea is more than sufficient, the main attention is to fields under the sea. Technically, this would be possible, as well as in salt caverns and aquifers, which are also being looked at for hydrogen storage. Besides offshore, is carbon storage possible in land-based depleted gas fields? TNO is conducting substantial supporting research for this purpose. For the time being, our focus is on depleted gas fields, as in the Porthos project, which is a collaboration between the Port of Rotterdam Authority, Gasunie, and Netherlands Energy Management (EBN). We could perhaps investigate in the Netherlands whether we have aquifers offshore that could be of interest. Countries such as Norway, Denmark, and the UK are also looking at storage, especially in aquifers. We therefore have many times the storage capacity of what we emit annually in our country. In the Dutch North Sea region, there is storage capacity for hundreds of megatonnes (millions of tonnes) in depleted gas fields. We are therefore mainly considering depleted gas fields and, to a limited extent, saline aquifers. ![]() After carbon capture, underground storage is the only option, and at such volumes, salt caverns are completely inadequate. Emission reductions involve huge amounts – tens of millions of tonnes annually in the Netherlands alone and hundreds of millions of tonnes each year for Europe. Why should carbon be stored?īecause we need to isolate CO2 permanently from the atmosphere. Reuse of CO2 is very likely to be deployed on a much smaller scale than CCS. Unlike CCS, CCU does not lead to emission reductions per se, except that it replaces fossil fuels to some extent. This is because you can also convert CO2 into valuable chemical building blocks from which you can make other products, such as electric fuels (e-fuels). The ‘U’ therefore stands for utilisation, or the reuse of CO2, while the ‘T’ stands for transport from the place where you capture the carbon to underground storage or a facility where you will do something else with it. It stands for Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS), and there is even CCTUS. A third way is to remove the CO2 present in the atmosphere using special technologies (direct air capture). But at TNO, we are also developing methods to remove CO2 early in the process (pre-combustion). You capture the carbon from flue gases after burning gas, coal, or waste. at the end of an industrial process, which is called post-combustion. The most common is carbon capture ‘at the smokestack’, i.e. Roughly speaking, there are two ways of doing this. CCS leads fairly quickly to major reductions in carbon emissions, in particular from energy-intensive industry and power plants. We will still be dependent on fossil fuels for our energy supply for a long time to come, despite global efforts, not least by TNO, to find sustainable alternatives. Because we need to prevent further climate change as much as possible and reduce CO2 emissions as quickly as possible, we cannot escape CCS. But the greenhouse gas CO2 is a cause of global warming. For a sustainable energy system alone, carbon capture and storage (CCS) is not really needed. We can solve the problem of climate change – to a not insignificant extent, that is. What problem do we solve with carbon capture and storage?
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