CO₂ Transport Systems Development: Status of Three Large European CCS Demonstration Projects with EEPR Funding

This paper addresses technical and operational aspects pertaining to the transport of CO₂. It deals with lessons learnt from the development of three large CCS demonstration projects: the UK-based Don Valley project, the Dutch ROAD project, and the Spanish Compostilla project. These projects were all selected by the European Commission in 2009 to receive funding under the European Energy Programme for Recovery (EEPR). The purpose of the demonstration projects is to verify feasible capture techniques (i.e. gasification, flue-gas cleaning, and oxy-coal combustion in circulating fluidised bed, respectively), and to demonstrate geological storage options, off-shore and on-shore. As the distance and elevation of the CO₂ transport system are inherently given by the project, the transport conditions for the CO₂ will generally differ from one project to another.

The demonstration projects have shown that the thermophysical nature of CO₂ is prone to complicate certain operational procedures mainly due to phenomena like phase change, hydrate formation and Joule-Thomson cooling. The front-end engineering design studies suggest, however, that the handling of CO₂ is quite feasible during normal operation, although customised solutions may be required to handle transients like emergency shut-down and pipeline re-pressurisation. This implies that CO₂ transport is not seen as an insuperable hurdle to the design and operation of large CCS systems.