Abstract
This report:
- Quantifies and forecasts the markets for technologies that capture and
sequester CO2, including "air capture" technologies.
- Analyzes applications of CCS technologies and estimates their adoption
rates in various industries and utilities.
- Covers legislative drivers in the U.S. and abroad.
- Provides complete R&D update, patent analysis, and international
developments.
- Estimates market shares of equipment producers.
- Includes company profiles.
INTRODUCTION
Study Goals and Objectives
The goal of the study was to determine what technologies exist to capture
carbon dioxide and at what price. A further goal was to determine what
technologies were emerging that could compete with the existing technologies
or displace them. An objective of the study was to determine what the costs
would be to the purchases of carbon capture equipment and also what the impact
would be on the consumer. Another objective was to determine which companies
owned the technologies to capture carbon dioxide and to determine how they
were positioning their technology to compete against other technologies and if
they were acquiring new technologies from startup companies.
Reasons for Doing the Study
With global warming receiving unprecedented coverage in the popular media, and
being recognized as a significant global problem requiring the participation
of most of the world' s governments and peoples to find a solution, this study
seeks to define exactly what is being done by whom with what expected results,
at what cost and what can be expected over the next 5 years. It also discusses
whether certain trends that are starting now can be expected to continue.
Intended Audience
The intended audience is those people who have an interest in reducing their
corporate carbon dioxide emissions and companies that may wish to invest in,
license, install, or acquire promising carbon dioxide capture technologies.
The report, as an impartial presentation of the best available technologies to
reduce CO2 emissions from power plants, this report, should also be of
interest to state utility regulators who must make decisions that affect
billion dollar investments by corporations as well as the future cost of
electricity for the rate payers.
This report should also be of interest to subcontractors in the electric power
construction industry, pipe manufacturers, and pipe fitters, as new electric
power projects that capture carbon dioxide will need to pipe it from the site
to a storage facility.
Scope of the Report
The report examines global markets for carbon dioxide capture and storage
technology, the status of the competing carbon capture technologies as well as
global technological research and developments for carbon capture technologies
to prevent global warming. It also covers technologies able to capture carbon
dioxide from stationary sources at the point of emission. This report does not
cover technologies that are used to capture other global warming gases such as
methane.
METHODOLOGY
The initial task was to determine the technologies most suited to capture
carbon dioxide for electric power applications and determine the cost of those
technologies based on the cost per megawatt (MW) of capacity. The second step
was to determine which companies were providing the technologies and which
companies were buying and why. The third step was to compile a list of the
projects for each of the three key technologies including the location, the
project owner, the expected cost of the project, the size of the project in
megawatts, how much carbon dioxide the project intends to capture per year,
and the provider of the carbon capture technologies. Those projects expected
to start in the 2007 to 2012 time frame form the basis for the forecast of
growth for the carbon capture technologies examined in this report.
As well as counting the number of new projects, another step involved was
counting existing projects employing the same technologies to determine
historic and current values for these technologies. These technologies have
found widespread use in other industries and applications not related to the
electric utility and not always related to capturing carbon dioxide. The
world' s oxygen market is discussed briefly to show the place of oxy-combustion
activity in other applications
The study needed to determine how much carbon dioxide needs to be captured in
billions of metric tons (MT) each year in order to bring world carbon dioxide
emissions back to the levels produced in 1990. The Kyoto treaty calls for
reductions of carbon dioxide below the levels of 1990, and more stringent
goals are expected to be negotiated in the next 2 years, but 1990 was chosen
as a baseline for estimates in this report.
Another step was to determine how much carbon dioxide in millions of metric
tons is being captured for the world merchant gas market, how much carbon
dioxide is being consumed in the manufacture of other chemicals and products,
and how much is being consumed by a tertiary method of oil recovery known as
enhanced oil recovery (EOR). This step included identifying the sources of
carbon dioxide used in these applications by company, and included estimates
of production for the U.S. and the rest of the world.
A thorough search of THOMAS.gov and other reliable sources was made to
determine the many bills pending before Congress that will affect the
regulation of CO2. A search for state records was also made to find U.S. state
legislation now in effect governing the emission of CO2. Regulation of CO2 on
the international and national level is the driving force in CO2 capture and
those regulations were surveyed as well.
U.S. patents were examined, and more than 100 research projects taking place
in the U.S., Europe, Canada, and Australia also were examined to determine
what new technologies were emerging that offer cheaper CO2 capture. All of
these sources were viewed together to determine the overall value of carbon
dioxide capture over the next 5 years.
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