Green light for carbon capture enterprise

The Gulf's first large-scale project to bury carbon underground is to go to tender after three years of negotiations between Abu Dhabi's oil company and its clean-energy counterpart. Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) and Masdar have agreed on a plan to inject carbon dioxide from a steel plant in Mussafah into an onshore oilfield after making "sufficient progress on the commercial principles", the companies said yesterday. Plans for a national carbon capture network had been in limbo since 2009 while the companies brokered a price at which Masdar would sell the greenhouse gas to Adnoc. "It sends a strong signal that carbon capture is not just for the sake of tree-hugging but is a viable commercial activity," said Philip Moss, a founder of the carbon and clean-technology advisory Mana Ventures and the former head of carbon trading at Masdar. The project has implications for the emirate's oil output, industrial growth and the global fight against climate change. The experimental technology of burying greenhouse gases underground - deployed on a large scale in only a handful of countries - is regarded as particularly promising for the Gulf, where the carbon can be used to coax crude out of mature fields. Masdar said it would open a tender for a facility to capture nearly 800,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year from the Emirates Steel plant, which would then be piped 50km to the nearby Rumaitha oilfield. Masdar did not say if it expected to have the project operating by 2014 as originally planned. The project is part of a planned national network that would include 500km of pipeline from industrial sites to the emirate's oilfields. The goal is to inject 6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide underground per year by 2015 and eventually as much as 30 million tonnes. Such projects would be eligible to earn credits under a UN framework, helping the emirate earn environmental credentials. Global carbon emissions are forecast to rise by 28 per cent by 2030, according to a report released by BP yesterday. "This is fundamentally important in solving climate change and it will be a great flagship project from this part of world," said Jeff Chapman, the chief executive of the Carbon Capture & Storage Association in London. "This is likely to be the first of many." The breakthrough in negotiations between Adnoc and Masdar opens the door for stalled projects such as a hydrogen-fuelled power plant to move ahead. In 2010 BP, Masdar's partner in the US$2 billion (Dh7.34bn) plant that was to feed into the carbon network, pulled its staff out of the project because of the delay in a decision over carbon pricing. Carbon capture will also allow the emirate to free up natural gas, which Adnoc today injects into fields to boost oil output, to instead be burned at power plants or industrial smelters. Although cheap in the emirate, natural gas is so scarce that Abu Dhabi has to import supplies from Qatar. As many as 100 carbon capture projects are needed by 2020, and 3,000 by 2050, to keep global warming in check, according to the International Energy Agency, a watchdog group in Paris.