Friday Afternoon Talk Series (FATS):
The Place of Carbon Capture and Storage in Climate Change Mitigation
University of Calgary, ES162
Friday, Feb. 7, 4 pm
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is one of the biggest challenges of the century. To keep global temperatures from increasing above 2°C, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says we need a combination of different technologies. Within this technology mix, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is cited as a key solution, providing 14% of cumulative CO2 emissions reduction through 2060. To achieve 14% to total reductions, over 5 giga tonnes (or Gt) must be captured through CCS by the year 2050, the equivalent of 2017’s annual emissions in the U.S. In 2019, the cumulative capacity of 20 worldwide large-scale facilities reached 40 million tonnes per year. Even if that number exponentially increases every year, we are still far from 5Gt.
Globally, we have the resources to store the necessary volumes of CO2. In Canada alone, reservoir capacity is estimated to 400Gt. Transportation and injection technologies are present as well, especially in North America with its long history of oil and gas development. As with every new technology, development and operating costs can be high. Every facility built so far has been the first of its kind. But with experience, knowledge sharing, and the development of new government carbon policies, costs are starting to decrease.
The support of public opinion and regulators is crucial in order to move towards giga tonnes storage. Key public concerns about storage revolve around issues of safety. CCS operators can help prove the long term safety of projects by demonstrating the secure containment and conformance of CO2 in the storage reservoir. It is vital that site operators be able to identify leaks and hazards early through monitoring programs.
The Field Research Station (FRS) was developed for just this purpose. This research station, developed by CMC Research Institutes’ Containment and Monitoring Institute (CaMI) and operated with support from the University of Calgary, accelerates research and development leading to improved understanding and monitoring technologies for secure geological storage of CO2. The FRS is an international initiative hosting five international energy companies, stakeholders from nine countries, and researchers from 13 post-secondary institutes. We’ve also helped train over 200 highly qualified personnel.
During this talk, we will give an overview of carbon capture and storage technology as well as an overview of the CCS on the world stage. The second part will focus on the CaMI Field Research Station, a pilot site in Brooks, Alberta for testing CCS monitoring technologies.
Dr. Marie Macquet’s bio:
Marie completed her M.Sc. in Planetology in 2011 at the University of Nantes (France) and graduated with her PhD in Geophysics in 2014 from ISTerre laboratory, University Joseph Fourier (Grenoble, France). By then, she was working on the crustal tomography of mountain ranges. She changed the focus of her work again in 2016 when she started with CREWES (University of Calgary) and CMC Research Institutes, and began focusing on the geophysical monitoring of the subsurface applied to CO2 sequestration. Her main research topic is the continuous monitoring using geophysics tools for early CO2 leakage detection.