September 2020

COMMENT n MOTHBALLING THE SURVIVAL OF HUMANITY As engineering and manufacturing companies struggle simultaneously with Covid-19 and Brexit uncertainty, one pressing challenge confronting us is climate change. At the time of writing, temperatures in parts of California are topping 50°C, as wildfires take hold and a mushroom cloud of smoke extends eight miles into the sky. Like all crises, global warming also offers an opportunity to use ingenious technologies, including advanced automation, to combat the challenge. Yet the holy grail of carbon capture continues to elude us. Billions have been spent on CCS (carbon capture and storage) r&d, and rosy predictions have been repeated ritually year in and year out. However, 15 years after development work on CCS began, there remains only one operational coal-fired carbon capture project in the US: NRG’s experimental Petra Nova project, south of Houston. A second CCS plant, the Boundary Dam Power Station owned by Saskatchewan Power (SaskPower), is in operation in Canada. Both projects are designed to implement post-combustion CO 2 capture. In the latter case, the joint initiative by NRG and JX Nippon is reckoned to be consistently capturing 90% of the CO 2 emitted by the plant. The pioneering projects at BD3 and Petra Nova offer a platform for gaining knowledge and delivering substantial improvements in the next round, not the least of which is overcoming early mechanical reliability issues. Downtime can also be shortened dramatically with redundancy, one example of which is the reliability of plate and frame heat exchangers. And common to both CCS plants has been scaling on the back of the booster fan blades, which caused vibrations and ultimately a shutdown in operations for cleaning. In the CO 2 compressor intercoolers there was a mismatch in the compatibility of materials, where essential knowledge has aided understanding of the optimummaterials to be used in future for next builds. But sadly, a decision has now been taken to place Petra Nova in a reserve shutdown status, influenced by external market forces – notably the prices of electricity and oil. Reports from the US Department of Energy question: • whether the plant consistently captured 90% of the carbon dioxide in the slipstream it was processing, as advertised; • what it cost to capture the CO 2 ; • howmuch the captured CO 2 helped in to boost production at NRG’s affiliated oil field; and • whether the Petra Nova project was ever economically viable. So, how do we define success in our modern technology-driven world? Is it the short-term economic and political factors, or the ability to protect the planet for our future generations? If success is consistently capturing 90% of the CO 2 , I would argue that they made it. Andy Pye, Consultant Editor Your Partner for Safety Engineering www.euchner.co.uk sales@euchner.co.uk 0114 256 0123