Isramart: Aiming to capture carbon by 2012

Isramart news:
A group looking to reduce harmful carbon dioxide emissions hopes to have a pilot project operating in Nova Scotia to store carbon gases by 2012, said David Fanning, CEO of the Carbon Capture and Storage Consortium.

The project developers are currently studying prospective sites to store the carbon being emitted from Nova Scotia Power’s generating plants, he said. “We are not drawing circles around power plants and saying we are only going to look at the geology there. We are going to look at the geology across the entire province,” said Fanning after speaking at an energy forum in Halifax on Thursday.

The pilot project would include capturing the carbon dioxide emissions from any of Nova Scotia Power’s coal-burning power plants and then injecting them into a reservoir.

“It may be close or it may not be,” said Fanning, a geologist who took over the helm in late 2009.

Preliminary results indicate large portions of the province are not suitable for carbon storage but Cape Breton and north and central mainland Nova Scotia appear to be good potential sites, said Fanning.

The potential site will not be selected for another year. Possible storage sites are places where oil and gas already exist underground. There are three or four functioning carbon storage projects in Western Canada, Norway and Algeria.

The focus of the consortium, which was established with funding from the federal government and Nova Scotia Power, is to determine if Nova Scotia’s geological makeup is capable of storing carbon emissions in an environmentally safe manner, he said.

Nova Scotia emits about 20 million tonnes of greenhouse gases annually. Nova Scotia Power’s coal-fired power plants are the largest single source, giving off about half that total.

Carbon capture storage is an attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from large industrial sources by separating carbon dioxide from other gases, collecting it and then transporting it through pipelines and storing it deep underground.

Research into capturing carbon gases has been going on in the United States and Western Canada for several years, he said.

“It is a potential solution. We are currently evaluating whether it is technically feasible and economically feasible,” said Fanning.