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Carbon Capture and Storage

Projects supervised by: Professor Quentin Fisher, Professor Andrew Gouldson, Dr Doug Angus, Professor Paul Williams, Dr William Nimmo, Professor Mohamed Pourkashanian, Dr Timothy Foxon, Professor John Barrett, Dr Kevin Hughes and Professor Derek Ingham

Researchers: Thom Best, Stephen Chilton, Tom Lynch, Sam Pickard

Combustion is the most mature energy technology in the world. Use of fossil fuels has provided the energy needed to revolutionise the standard of living for the majority of the planet and has the potential to alleviate the poverty of billions more. It is also the greatest contributor to anthropocentric climate change but with the availability of Carbon Capture Storage (CCS) to mitigate in excess of 90% of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel power plants it should not be written off in the near to midterm.

For Coal CCS would bring emissions down to less than 100gCO2e/kWh, and gas half that again.

Currently the UK is reliant on fossil fuel power generation for providing over 70% of its energy mix, in the future this will hopefully be replaced with renewables but there must be the capacity to balance any increase in a countries renewable generation capacity. In most countries there is simply not the physical geography to build low carbon energy storage capacity to suffice the energy gap that will occur during low renewables generation. To meet this gap CCS fitted fossil fuel power stations would be ideal, able to vary power output within short periods unlike nuclear.

The DTC and Carbon Capture and Storage

At the University of Leeds students are researching alternative fuels for co-firing, experimental post combustion capture and Oxy-fuel combustion, as well as working closely with computational modelling of combustion. In collaboration with the University of Sheffield there is access to some of the newest and largest test facilities outside industry to do this.

Beyond combustion the DTC is also looking at the storage of captured CO2 using fluid flow and geomechanical modelling to investigate CO2 storage security, capacity and integrity in the North Sea. Currently there is an estimated capacity of more than 18GtCO2 in saline aquifers and depleted oil and gas reservoirs, this is equivalent to more than 90 years’ worth of CO2 emissions from the UK energy sector.