UK, Canadian firms start pre-FEED on Scottish DAC
UK carbon management company Storegga Geotechnologies and Carbon Engineering (CE), a Canadian company pioneering direct air capture (DAC) of CO2, said June 24 they have begun pre-FEED work on their Dreamcatcher carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) project in Scotland.
On the heels of feasibility work completed earlier this year, and with a £249,000 grant in hand from the UK government, the pre-FEED (front end engineering and design) work will focus on engineering the design of a facility that will capture and sequester between 500,000 and 1mn mt/yr of CO2. Further developing cost estimates and modelling the economics of a facility in the northeast of Scotland are also part of the brief, as is final site selection from a shortlist of potential sites already identified.
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Scotland was chosen for Dreamcatcher for a number of reasons, the companies said, including abundant renewable energy sources that will power the capture technology, existing infrastructure that can be re-deployed and workers from the North Sea oil and gas industry who have the skills required to develop and operate DAC plants. Scotland also offers significant offshore sequestration sites.
“DAC technology is critical to remove large quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere in order to meet our climate goals,” Storegga CEO Nick Cooper said. “The development of a DAC facility in the UK will put our country on the map as being at the forefront of net negative technologies and the technology will enable hard to abate sectors to create plans to reach net zero emissions.”
CE has been developing its DAC technology for the past decade, CEO Steve Oldham said, optimising a “highly scalable” and affordable system for removing CO2 from the air. Now, he said, its focus is on global deployment of the technology.
“Our first one megatonne DAC facility is underway in the US, and we’re thrilled to be working with Storegga to develop a large-scale facility in the UK – the first of its kind and size in Europe,” he said. “These facilities will demonstrate that large-scale DAC technology is a feasible, affordable and available tool that is ready to help bring global emissions down to net zero, and eventually net negative.”
The pre-FEED work is expected to be finished in Q1 2022, with detailed engineering expected to follow in Q2 2022. Storegga and CE are aiming to have Dreamcatcher operational by 2026.