[Premium] Ambitious OGCI Carbon Plan Still on Drawing Board

The group of ten oil companies involved in the $1bn fund announced almost a year ago to cut emissions, the Oil & Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI), has  given NGW only a rough idea of the scope of their planned investment in a gas-fired power plant, coupled with carbon capture and storage technology.

However it says that its endeavours will be focused on the UK.

Commercially viable carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is the missing link in national plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and thereby it is hoped limit global warming, in line with the United Nations' Paris Agreement. The UN Environmental Programme October 31 said, in its Emissions Gap Report, that national pledges will achieve only one-third of the reduction in emissions required by 2030 to meet Paris climate targets.

Even unabated gas-fired power plants will not pass muster from an environmental viewpoint. 

So when the group of influential companies announced October 27 investments in three projects aimed at cutting emissions from industrial processes, one of which was to be a "full-scale gas power plant with carbon capture and storage, including industrial CO₂ sequestration capability," it gave rise to hopes for either an entirely new project. Failing a new project, the expectation was for a revival of older plans formulated in the UK some years ago in response to a government-funded competition, but which then withered on the vine when that funding was withdrawn.

NGW asked for more details: the country involved, the nature of the carbon dioxide storage site, for example, a depleted gas field; the plant’s nameplate capacity and any other details such as funding and whether it is dependent on any support such as a capacity mechanism.

However the plans have not got that far yet: "The project is in the evaluation phase (analysis of a base case and comparison with alternative development options to define the best technical and economical set up)," it said.

OGCI told NGW that OGCI Climate Investments had acquired the clean gas project (CGP) from the UK Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) in the autumn of this year, but the CGP is just a plan "to design a gas-power plant with carbon capture and storage that can also store CO₂ from local industrial emitters, thus reducing CO₂ emissions by up to 90%."

The ETI project was focused on developing a commercially viable solution for the UK, while incorporating the learnings from prior Carbon Capture and Storage competitions in the UK, as well as the guidance provided in the Oxburgh 2016 Report, they said. The Oxburgh Report to parliament was published in September 2016; since then, its chairman Ron Oxburgh has told NGW that CCS was the "elephant in the room" whenever forecasts or scenarios about future climate change were published.

However, OCGI said the project team is working with the public and private sectors at central and local levels in order to select the best technology, site and investors, and to promote efficient use of CO₂. It said also that the mandate of its investments is global and the interest is in scaling commercially viable Carbon Capture, Utilisation, and Storage (CCUS) in order to see significant impact on greenhouse gases. It naturally has a great interest in the UK but also sees this work "having the potential to be a model for other areas, helping to achieve the necessary scale of impact."

William Powell