The success of carbon capture, utilisation, and storage (CCUS) is critical to reach net zero, with expertise from other industries furthering the value chain in Scotland.
Without a strong CCUS sector, industrial decarbonisation efforts are unlikely to succeed. But the CCUS market is still developing and so the best chances of success will come from other sectors providing essential transferable capabilities for new developments.
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Within CCUS, there are two distinct areas. The first is carbon capture and storage (CCS), where carbon is permanently stored after capture. The second is carbon capture and utilisation (CCU), where any carbon captured is treated for industrial reuse. In Scotland, innovative companies from other industries are providing vital niche services that cover key aspects in both CCS and CCU.
Locating subsea sites with the necessary properties to store carbon
One of the first steps for CCS is to identify locations to sequester carbon with the necessary volume and geological properties. Scotland has numerous subsea oil and gas fields that are now depleted of hydrocarbons, with many offering optimum conditions for long term carbon storage.
Belltree is a prime example of a company applying its expertise from another industry to CCS. The Edinburgh-based company provides the bMark™ data and analytics software, as well as consultancy services that traditionally focused on oil and gas fields. The company includes geologists, data scientists, and reservoir engineers to help deliver maximum asset performance and accurately determine the potential in field reserves.
The idea behind expanding the bMark™ platform into CCS formed around 2019. Through the Scottish Enterprise Advanced Innovation Programme, the company began exploring innovation opportunities. CCS was identified as a new industry where Belltree solutions could be hugely beneficial. The company is now leveraging its extensive datasets to help its subscribers identify suitable locations for storing captured carbon via the bMark™ platform.
“Within five years, we were thinking there would be companies looking to allocate capital or investment firms or banks that are not tied to a specific licence. But they would be very interested in knowing which licences are the least risky, the most opportunistic, the best position versus emitters,” explains Peter Clark, technical director and senior reservoir engineer at Belltree. “They’re going to want a screening solution that gives them that data. And the ability, importantly, to use that data quickly.”
Originally, the thinking at Belltree was that the bMark™ CCS expansion would be used by the company’s traditional core market of oil and gas regulators and operators looking to build storage projects. However, the features soon began to generate interest and value on the emissions side. For example, carbon-intensive industries such as cement and steel plants are seeking ways to curb their emissions.
Operators in these industries often have little knowledge of the subsurface or access to relevant data. The bMark™ CCS platform and advice available from Belltree enable industrial emitters to learn more about viable sites for sequestering their carbon beneath the seabed.
Extensive data on sites for carbon storage
Belltree has been honing and synthesizing the data in bMark™ over many years, with more than 230 technical parameters within the platform. High volumes of data provide context around specific sites, profiling more than 300 CCS and CO2 injection projects, with an estimated 12,000 CO2 point source emitters. All data is open source, with nothing anonymised to ensure vital transparency. Data is also updated regularly.
“bMark™ CCS is not just a big pile of static data. It’s a living database that’s continuously updated,” adds Clark. “It’s a dynamic workflow that allows you to take elements of that data, plug it into the workflow, and generate results, storativity, injectivity, and risk primarily.”
Unlike more high-level basin reports, bMark™ CCS has been designed to be a working platform for engineers and geoscientists at a granular level, typically by field or even individual reservoir.
Initially, limited information was available on aquifers. However, data is now increasing in bMark™ CCS due to targeted research focused on the specific petrophysics of aquifers, the depth, location, and suitability of storage sites. Data has been collected for more than 500 aquifers to date, with data volumes increasing daily.
Crucially, the quality and granularity of data available on sealing formations of reservoirs have also been upgraded with the bMark™ CCS development. Locations with the necessary geological properties can be screened to minimise the risk of carbon leaking from storage sites.
Maps with data spanning multiple industrial sectors may also help avoid future disputes where project licences overlap, and approvals involve different authorities. The balance of industries in the North Sea is shifting towards the energy transition. Subsea data insights offer vital opportunities to better plan projects and help avoid future delays.
Creating market opportunities for CCUS in Scotland
Once an appropriate CCS site has been identified, businesses require a method to capture and transport carbon for storage. Expertise in this area is also developing in Scotland.
The Carbon Removers is another example of a Scottish company not only using its experience from another sector to take a leading role in the CCUS industry development but also proving the value of both CCS and CCU.
Established by brothers Ed and Richard Nimmons, The Carbon Removers started as a provider of dry ice blasting for oil rigs. The company later expanded to capture liquid CO2 and produce dry ice for industrial users from the local food and pharma industries. According to the company’s projections, it aims to remove one million tonnes of carbon a year by the first few years of the 2030s, by expanding in Scotland, the UK, and across Europe.
“If you understand the CCU value chain well and have been dealing with it for ten to 12 years, clearly, a lot of that is very applicable to CCS,” says Raphael Pfaeltzer, chief operating officer of The Carbon Removers.
The dry ice production business continues to operate and bring in much of the company’s revenue as the CCUS sector develops, but the balance is starting to shift. More recent additions to The Carbon Removers’ services offer considerable promise for future CCUS markets. One relatively new offering is a verifiable model for carbon removal credits, targeted at operations seeking to offset hard-to-abate residual emissions.
In CCS, The Carbon Removers is focused on biogenic CO2 produced from operations such as biomethane and distilleries. Installing The Carbon Removers’ module at the site enables the direct capture of biogenic CO2, with the company also handling transportation of gases in cryogenic ISO-tanks. Biogenic CO2 is then sequestered in carbonated building materials. In future, geological storage offshore will be an option.
The company has also expanded into Denmark. From 2026, the Scottish company expects to capture an estimated 50,000t of biogenic CO2 a year from Danish industries and then transport it to permanent storage sites. The contract is supported by a subsidy for negative emissions from the Danish Energy Agency and runs until 2032.
Gaining value from captured carbon
To gain value from CCU, high purity CO2 is often essential. A purity of 99.9% is required for biogenic CO2 to be used in food or pharma grade applications. As biogenic CO2 is produced from alcohol and biomethane with a purity of around 95%-97%, increasing the levels requires far less intensive processing than CO2 coming from other industries. For example, biogenic CO2 from biomass power stations typically starts with a purity of 12%-15%, meaning intensive processing is required to achieve the necessary level of purification. Consequently, the economics reduce as the processes intensify.
“We’ve made a commercial financial business decision to only capture that biogenic CO2 from the highest purity, lowest capture cost sources, which also have the most sustainable sources of waste biomass feedstocks. And that basically means either alcohol production or biomethane,” says Pfaeltzer. “The lower purity sources would like to sell in that market, but just have no commercial way of making a profit. When I say we are ‘high purity’, it means we compete.”
Historically, the European CCU market was dominated by a limited number of factories producing ammonia. This is the only process that results in higher-purity biogenic CO2 than biomethane or alcohol production. Yet there are signs this could change as new innovations become a reality and the CCUS industry develops into a real-world market.
“It’s become commercially real. It used to be things that just existed on PowerPoint,” says Pfaeltzer.
How Scotland leads in CCUS
A strong CCUS value chain with a diverse range of services is integral to establishing the market. In Scotland, Aberdeen is emerging as a hotspot for CCUS specialists.
This is demonstrated by examples of three companies based there. Axis is an internationally recognised provider of oil and gas consultancy services. In 2015, the company started offering CCUS services and can identify locations for carbon storage based on its knowledge of wells and reservoirs. Another company is Precision Impulse, which can confirm locations for sequestration of carbon through seismic monitoring technology, as well as verify that stored carbon does not leak. In addition, Kraken Robotics can monitor the integrity of subsea CCUS infrastructure.
Bolstering the Scottish CCUS value chain is the experience and talent from the North Sea oil and gas industry, along with world-class research from the country’s universities. The growing industry is further strengthened by government funding and support from economic development agencies such as Scottish Enterprise.
“Scotland is seen to be a leader in the energy transition, and it obviously has a huge depth of talent in oil and gas. Frankly, it is oil and gas people who you want to be implementing CCS projects,” adds Clark. “There’s a huge opportunity to use the talent we have in Scotland, that’s also very highly respected. We’ve been exporting training and oil and gas knowledge to the rest of the world for years,” he continues. “We can become world-leading experts in CCS and export that to countries who may be ten or 15 years behind [us].”
To learn more about CCUS in Scotland, download the document below. To discover further information about how the Scottish value chain is developing in CCUS, register for the forthcoming webinar here.
