Japanese Coalition, Australian Consortium Confirm CCS Project On Scedule

Japan-based J-Power, an electric utility, plans to market fully-integrated carbon capture and storage (CCS) project to fight against the carbon dioxide emissions. The company is a part of a Japanese coalition working with Australia on this project, reported Reuters.

Masaharu Fujitomi, managing director of J-Power stated that the $200m Callide A OxyFuel project is on schedule to start up a 30MW coal-fired power facility in July-September 2011. The project is located in Queensland, Australia, reported Reuters.

Mr. Fujitomi, said: “The biggest selling point is that existing coal plants can be retrofitted to use the OxyFuel technology, allowing energy efficient plants to lower CO2. If you replace the whole plant with an integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC), there would be some concerns about costs and reliability. If the regulations become tougher, OxyFuel can be also used for oil and gas-fired thermal plants.”

The power generating companies annually use approximately 20 million tons of thermal coal. The company is putting its efforts to decarbonize the coal-burnt power plants with its CCS technology.

The CCS technology grabs carbon from the power plants and buries, in order to take it out of the atmosphere, reducing emissions by approximately 90%. The OxyFuel method burns coal with pure oxygen, making almost pure CO2 gas and water vapor, which facilitates carbon capture. The carbon is separated, condensed to a liquid, transported by trailers and is buried.

The consortium of companies involved in the project includes J-Power, Queensland government-owned power supplier CS Energy and Schlumberger Ltd, IHI Corp, Xstrata, Mitsui & Co, and the Australian Coal Association.

The project is a consolidation of Japan’s OxyFuel technology and Australia’s CCS fields under the sponsorship of the Japanese and Australian governments. During the experiment over 3-years, approximately 100,000 tons of carbon is expected to be stored, which is approximately 10-15% of the plant’s total emissions.

The company said that since 2008 Sweden’s Vattenfall has been testing the OxyFuel process on a pilot 30MW thermal boiler at a power plant in Germany but carbon storage has not been conducted amid protests from locals.

The company is involved in combating climate change, participating in an oxygen-blow IGCC project that involves a 170MW demonstration plant with a CCS facility. The government of Japan has set a mid-term target to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by 2020.