Pearson BTEC Level 3 Nationals Extended Diploma

Applied Science
Unit 7: Contemporary Issues in Science

Part A
Sample assessment material for first teaching Paper Reference
September 2017
Supervised period: 6 hours
31629H
You do not need any other materials.

Instructions
• Part A contains material for the completion of the preparatory work for the
set task.
• Part A is given to learners 2 weeks before Part B is scheduled. Learners are
advised to spend no more than 6 hours on Part A.
• Part A must be given to learners on the specified date so that learners can
prepare in the way specified.
• Part A is specific to each series and this material must only be issued to learners
who have been entered to undertake the task in the relevant series.
• Part B materials must be issued to learners on the date specified by Pearson.

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©2017 Pearson Education Ltd.

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 Instructions to Teachers/Tutors
This paper must be read in conjunction with the unit information in the specification and
the BTEC Nationals Instructions for Conducting External Assessments (ICEA) document.
See the Pearson website for details.
This set task has a preparatory period. Part A sets out how learners should prepare for
the completion of the Part B task under supervised conditions.
Part A is given to learners two weeks before Part B is scheduled. Learners are advised to
spend no more than six hours on Part A.
Learners should undertake independent research on the case study given in this Part A
booklet.
Centres must issue this booklet at the appropriate time and advise learners of the
timetabled sessions during which they can prepare. It is expected that scheduled lessons
or other timetabled slots will be used for the preparation.
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in the articles.
Learners may prepare summary notes on the articles. Learners may take up to four sides
of notes of this type into the supervised assessment (Part B booklet).
These notes should only include information about scientific terminology, quantities and
concepts used in the articles and a summary of the scientific issue discussed. This will
enable learners to interpret, analyse and evaluate the articles in Part B. Other content is
not permitted.
Part B must be completed under supervision in a single 2 hour 30 minute session
timetabled by Pearson. A supervised rest break is permitted.
The supervised assessment should be completed in the Part B task and answer booklet.
Teachers/Tutors should note that:
• learners should not be given any direct guidance or prepared materials
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• all work must be completed independently by the learner
• learner notes will be retained securely by the centre after Part B and may be
requested by Pearson if there is suspected malpractice.
Refer carefully to the instructions in this taskbook and the BTEC Nationals Instructions for
Conducting External Assessments (ICEA) document to ensure that the preparatory period
is conducted correctly and that learners have the opportunity to carry out the required
activities independently.

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 Instructions for Learners
Read the set task information carefully.
This is Part A of the set task and gives the information you need to use to prepare for
Part B of the set task.
In Part B you will be asked to carry out specific activities using the information in this
Part A booklet and your preparatory notes.
In your preparation for Part B, using this Part A booklet, you may prepare short notes to
refer to when completing the set task. Your notes may be up to four sides of A4 and may
be handwritten or typed. Your notes should only include information about scientific
terminology, quantities and concepts used in the articles and a summary of the scientific
issue discussed. This will enable you to interpret, analyse and evaluate the articles in Part
B. Other content is not permitted.
You will complete Part B under supervised conditions.
You must work independently and must not share your work with other learners.
Your teacher/tutor may give guidance on when you can complete the preparation.
Your teacher/tutor cannot give you feedback during the preparation period.
You must not take your preparatory notes out of the classroom at anytime and you must
hand them in to your teacher/tutor on completion.
Your notes will be made available to you at the beginning of the supervised assessment.

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 Set Task Brief
You are provided with the following articles:
Article 1: Carbon capture can drive a 21st century revival of British industry
Article 2: Carbon capture and storage: will it ever work?
Article 3: The grand challenges in carbon capture, utilization, and storage
You need to become familiar with the articles and gain an understanding of the scientific
issue discussed in the articles so that you are able to interpret, analyse and evaluate the
articles in preparation for Part B.
Your notes should only include information about scientific terminology, quantities and
concepts used in the articles and a summary of the scientific issue discussed.
You should spend up to a maximum of six hours to complete your preparatory notes. You
may take up to four sides of A4 notes into the supervised assessment.

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 Part A Set Task Information
Article 1:
Carbon capture can drive a 21st century revival of British industry
Written by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
21 August 2016 – 8:49pm

SaskPower in Canada has already kicked off carbon capture, but the greatest
promise lies in Britain CREDIT: SASKPOWER
Renaissance beckons for the once great industrial hubs of northern England and
Scotland, and the unexpected catalyst may be stringent global climate controls.
What looks at first sight like an economic threat could instead play elegantly to Britain’s
competitive advantage, for almost no other country on earth is so well-placed to
combine energy-intensive manufacturing with carbon capture at a viable cost.
The industrial clusters of the Tees Valley and the Humber are linked by a network of
pipelines to depleted and well-mapped oil and gas fields in the North Sea, offering rare
access to infrastructure for carbon storage deep underground.
Liverpool has old wells of its own offshore in the Irish sea. Scotland’s heavy industry in
Grangemouth and the Forth have feeder pipelines to the Golden Eye.
Such sites may not be worth much today – with carbon prices in Europe too low to
matter at barely $5 a tonne – but the COP21 climate deal agreed in Paris last December
transforms the long-term calculus.
It implies a tightening regime of higher carbon penalties for the next half century, ending
in net zero CO2 emissions. Once prices approach $50 a tonne the equation changes.
Beyond $100 it inverts the pyramid of energy wealth: profits accrue to those with access
to the cheapest low carbon power.
“Storage will be much more valuable than the fossil fuels themselves. If you are an
energy-intensive industry in the middle of Europe and you don’t have CO2 storage, you’re
stuffed,” said professor Jon Gibbins from Sheffield University.

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The Government’s ‘Heseltine report’ into the regeneration of Teesside concludes that
carbon capture and storage (CCS) could reap windfall gains. “This is a rare instance when
existing industries can harness a new technology and ensure that Britain becomes a
European and world leader,” it said.
Britain is already a player in CCS technology. Shell Cansolv installed the world’s first utility
scale filtering system on a 110 megawatt coal-plant for SaskPower in Canada.
UK engineers Costain are managing a project for Emirates Steel Industries in Abu Dhabi,
capturing the CO2 at source and transporting it in pipes for ‘enhanced oil recovery’ (EOR),
a technique to extract more crude from depleted fields.
The UK Oil & Gas Authority says such EOR could extend the life of North Sea fields for
another decade and generate an extra 250 million barrels of oil equivalent. Ultimately it
could be much more, depending on global crude prices.
Yet Britain has not yet launched carbon capture at home. The Cameron government
abruptly halted a £1 billion prize for two world-leading CCS projects last November,
prompting a lacerating rebuke from the Commons Select Committee on Energy and
Climate Change.
“The manner in which the carbon capture and storage competition was cancelled, weeks
before the final bids were to be submitted and without any prior indication given to the
relevant parties, was both disappointing and damaging,” it said in February.
“The delay in bringing forward any subsequent plans seems to be in direct contradiction
with the direction of energy policy. If Government does not come up with a clear strategy
very soon, knowledge, investment, assets and expertise in the UK will all be lost,” it said.
The suspension was a Treasury decision, a blunder made by a department in thrall to
an austerity doctrine that should have no place in a depressed 1930s world awash with
excess savings and offering the lowest bond yields in history.
The British state can borrow for twenty years at 1.23pc. It should do so without hesitation
for the infrastructure projects that pay for themselves, and this one plausibly promises to
transform the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ from pious rhetoric to hard reality. It is investment
on steroids.

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The drastic implications of COP21 are still sinking in. A maximum ‘carbon budget’ of 3,000
gigatonnes – deemed necessary to stop temperatures rising more than 2 degrees Celsius
above pre-industrial levels – may mean zero emissions from the power sector by mid-
century.
“There are areas like farming and aircraft travel where it is tougher to drive down
emissions, so other areas will have to go negative to meet the target,” said prof Gibbins.
The term ‘negative’ is confusing but it essentially means combining CCS with bioenergy.
The accord was signed by 195 countries, led by the US and China. It makes no difference
whether you accept the hypothesis of man-made global warming. The deal constitutes
the political will of the world, and will be legally-binding in the sense that each state
transposes its commitments into domestic law.
It is possible that Donald Trump will be elected US president and that the global
consensus will unravel. But Britain cannot make strategic plans based on what a putative
President Trump might or might not do, and I write this article on the assumption that
COP21 will remain the global framework.
A study of Britain’s CCS potential for the old Department of Energy and Climate Change
(DECC) concluded that there are five optimal sites that can meet the UK’s needs and
service Europe.
“There are no major technical hurdles. The UK is endowed with offshore geology that
presents a superlative national CO2 storage proposition,” it said.
The cradle-to-grave “levelised unit cost” of transport and storage (not the separate CCS
process itself ) ranges from £11 to £18 per tonne of CO2, adding £5 to £9 per megawatt
hour (MWh) to electricity costs.
The capital cost covering all sites is estimated at £4.4bn with an offshore lifetime of forty
years, with £6bn of operating costs.
Carbon capture is still in its infancy, like wind and solar twenty years ago, before an
avalanche of subsidies created the scale needed to jump-start the technology. Shell
expects a similar “race down the cost-curve” for CCS, ultimately undercutting offshore
wind by a big margin.

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Luke Warren from the UK’s Carbon Capture and Storage Association says gas-fired CCS
could drop to £85 per MWh by the late 2020s, comparable to other renewables by then
but with the advantage that it serves as “dispatchable” power whenever needed. It does
not suffer from the curse of intermittency. “We think costs will come plummeting down
but it needs government intervention to develop the infrastructure,” he said.
Canada’s SaskPower plant has at least shown that it can be done, extracting 90pc of the
CO2. It loses 18pc of the power, the so-called “parasitic load”, better than feared.
The utility says it has learned so much from its first trial and error efforts that it could cut
30pc off the cost of the next plant. Yet the project is so heavily subsidised that it tells us
little about the likely economics of CCS in the 2030s.
Nobody will know what the cost-curve looks like until the Government has taken the
plunge, and it would be feckless for Britain to try and coast as a “late mover” on the
uncertain efforts of other countries with less geographic incentive to act.
The Green movement is split on carbon capture. Friends of the Earth calls it a “20th
century concept” that keeps the current fossil-based energy mode alive. “Rather than
being a solution, it risks perpetuating the problem”. This neglects a salient fact that steel,
cement, and chemical plants – among others – emit large amounts of CO2 as part of the
industrial process, regardless of whether their electricity is from renewables.
Greenpeace calls CCS a “risky distraction”, fearing CO2 leakage and further acidification
of the oceans. This is certainly a legitimate concern. But then it switches tack – in an odd
alliance with climate sceptics – asserting that “CCS doesn’t work” and that the technology
is an exorbitant failure everywhere. “There isn’t a single commercial-scale power plant
capturing and storing its emissions,” it states.
Greenpeace is making its case based on a snapshot of today’s cost, rather than
envisaging what CCS would look like with scale and start-up funding. Fair enough, but
that is not the way it argues when pushing for renewables.

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Their view is not shared by most climate policy experts. Britain’s official Committee on
Climate Change says carbon capture is likely to be a “crucial part of the least-cost path to
decarbonisation in the UK, and globally.”
The International Panel of Climate Change estimates that it would cost 140pc more
to meet the Paris goals without CCS technology – given what we now know about
alternatives. A new research paper by Imperial College London concludes that renewable
energy and CCS together are absolutely imperative. “It is not a case of one or the other,”
it said.
Britain has a chance to revive its programme when Lord Oxburgh reports to the
government next month on the future of CCS. For Teesside it may be the difference
between revival and irreversible decline.

Horses racing the world’s railway from Darlington to Stockton in 1825

Credit: THISISSTOCKTON
Teesside’s resilience has been extraordinary. The valley has somehow held on after so
many of its industries were abandoned to their fate in the 1980s, and it then had to face
the threat of Chinese mercantilism. The valley is still home to 58pc of Britain’s chemical
industry.
But its Achilles Heel is the cost of power. Five of the UK’s top 25 CO2-emitting plants are
packed together between Darlington and the mouth of the North Sea.
There is a poignant history to Teesside. It was there that the Industrial Revolution reached
full flowering with the opening of the Stockton & Darlington railway in 1825, proceeded
by a man on a horse with a flag reading Periculum Privatum Utilitas Publica – no
translation needed for Telegraph readers.
The line carried coal from the Durham mines to the river. By the 1860s Teesside hosted
the greatest iron works in the world. Its steel later supported the Sydney Harbour Bridge
and the London Shard – until Thai-owned SSI finally shut down the last furnaces at
Redcar in October. Let us hope that is not the last sad chapter.

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 Teesside’s Newport Iron Works in its glory days
when the valley was the world’s top producer
I have tried to float a few ideas this August on how to fashion a British energy policy fit
for the 21st Century. The list is inadequate. I have not even touched on the possibilities
of geothermal energy, or even the simple expedient of flooding old mines to generate
warmth through heat exchangers.
I have barely mentioned the forgotten drive for energy efficiency, 40pc of the gains
needed by 2050. Nor have I explored the potential of power-to-gas conversion through
electrolysis, a break-through that could store energy for months and overcome the
seasonal variations of wind and solar.
Thank you to those on the front-line who have sent me breath-taking material on
scientific advances. You have left me more convinced than ever that humanity is about to
conquer this challenge. I now return to my normal job covering the world economy.
(Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/08/21/carbon-
capture-can-drive-a-21st-century-revival-of-british-indus/)

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Article 2:
Carbon Capture and Storage: Will it ever work?
Written by Zachary Davies Boren
April 29, 2015 – 1:29pm

As a fractious UK general election draws near there is a remarkable consensus on one

little noticed issue.
All 7 main political parties, including the Greens, think we should explore, or develop,
carbon capture and storage (CCS) – albeit with varying degrees of skepticism.
It’s an enticing idea for some.
CCS refers to a range of mostly beta-stage technologies designed to capture the carbon
dioxide released by burning fossil fuels and industrial processes and store it indefinitely
with the intention of breaking the link between carbon emissions and climate change.
Yet in the UK and around the world CCS is at a crucial juncture following high-profile
failures in Europe and the US that suggest the sector’s longstanding financial and
credibility issues remain an existential threat.
The major utilities that backed Europe’s carbon capture platform have this year dropped
out, citing cost concerns; and the US government has pulled the plug on its once
promising FutureGen CCS facility, also due to money troubles.
Despite years of vociferous backing from the International Energy Agency (IEA), the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a host of major world leaders
and most political parties in the developed world, CCS continues to move forward at only
a snail’s pace – it’s lagging behind its development targets by a factor of 10.
Compared to renewables – a technology which has never achieved anything like such
consensus – it’s non-existent.
Yet there’s still an appetite for CCS, and the IPCC still expects it to provide 14% of the
world’s carbon emissions cuts by 2050. Without it there is a hole in the plans of global
institutions to tackle climate change – but patience is waning.
Graeme Sweeney, who runs the EU’s Zero Emissions Platform (ZEP), told Energydesk:
“The next seven years are critical for CCS”.

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What actually is CCS?
Carbon dioxide gas is captured, most often at a power or industrial station, then
funnelled through pipelines to be injected (or ‘stored’) in rock formations underground.
In many ways, CCS is competing against technologies such as wind and solar power that
have seen their costs plummet in recent years to the point of near price-parity with fossil
fuels.
That has seen a change in what people want from the tech. A recent study from Oxford
University said technology shouldn’t be used for coal power because there are viable
alternatives (namely renewables).
Despite these significant obstacles, proponents argue there could still be a place for CCS
even if efforts to use it for power generation fail: the industrial sector.
Especially in recent weeks, energy analysts have loudly advocated for CCS use in energy
intensive industries such as steel, cement and paper, with the think tank Green Alliance
saying it is “clearly the lead technology for carbon mitigation [in industry]”.
Where CCS is at around the world
According to the Global CCS Institute, the 13 carbon capture projects currently in
operation around the world, along with the nine under construction, should have the
capacity to capture 40 million tonnes of CO2 a year.
(Credit the Carbon Brief for the interactive map below, which features in their ‘Around the
World in 22 CCS Projects’ piece)

There’s also the possibility that, like FutureGen, some of these projects will fall victim
to inherent financial foibles, but there are many possible projects just getting off the
ground as well.
Among those prospective projects are the two finalists in the UK government’s CCS
competition – The White Rose and Peterhead – the winner of which (or both or neither)
will be decided by year’s end.

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There are only two active projects on the continent – both in Norway – that together
sequester around 1.5 million tonnes of carbon a year – a far cry from the 220 million the
EU wants to bury by 2030.
‘Not an option for the foreseeable future’
RWE, one of the leading utilities that left ZEP in January, told Energydesk in a statement it
did so because “the economic conditions and the regulatory and economic environment
have changed so that CCS is not an option for the foreseeable future”.
Though the German energy giant maintains it still supports CCS, its exit demonstrates
an industry-wide struggle with a technology upon which its future may depend. It’s a
problem which has angered many of the technology’s advocates.
Chris Littlecott, an energy expert from think-tank E3G, told Energydesk: “The coal sector
has shown itself to be spectacularly incapable of aligning different interests to invest in
CCS.
“It seemed logical to policy makers that coal producers and utilities had a self-interest in
advancing CCS. So far that hasn’t been the case.”
“In my experience they have been willing to talk about CCS while blocking any
meaningful policy approach.”
It is a sentiment echoed by the UK’s former climate envoy John Ashton who, in a furious
open letter to Shell, a company that has long-championed CCS and currently runs the
Peterhead project, wrote: “There is no engineering reason why dozens of large CCS
installations should not already be running across Europe.
“With no compact to share additional costs between taxpayers, consumers and
shareholders, CCS at scale remains empty talk.”
Stuart Haszeldine, a CCS scientist at Edinburgh University, agreed: “CCS is proceeding
much much slower than any other renewable power technology.”
He told Energydesk this was down to the government policy failures, particularly the lack
of a high carbon price.
He said it should be “treated more like renewables with initial subsidies”, a view shared
by IEA analyst Simon Bennett who this year said there shouldn’t be “unnecessary
favouritism”.
Whilst renewables receive support per unit of power generated, CCS projects have
generally been offered upfront capital without ongoing subsidies.
And whilst the UK’s new Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme could change this, per
unit subsidies for CCS run into a problem which doesn’t apply to renewables or nuclear –
the cost of gas or coal can change.
A recent report from the European Commission proposed binding CCS targets as another
possible policy solution.

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 The Kemper project in Mississippi will use EOR (Wikimedia)
CCS with oil recovery – less expensive but less clean
Nearly three quarters of CCS projects around the world (10 in operation and 6 in
construction) will send their captured carbon dioxide right back into fossil fuel extraction
via Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) – and this may undo more than 60% of CCS climate
benefits, according to a Grist analysis.
CCS with EOR simply makes more financial sense, and an actual commercial-scale project
was completed late last year at the Boundary Dam coal-fired station in Canada.
Boundary Dam, which was designed to capture 90% of carbon emissions, wasn’t cheap
– it cost $1.2 billion in total, and received almost $200 million in subsidies for its $280
million carbon capture.
It was, however, made more affordable than regular CCS through a partnership with
Albertan oil company Cenovus, to which it sells the captured CO2.
Sask Power, which runs Boundary Dam, claims the CCS is “exceeding expectations” and
Haszeldine told Energydesk the Dam’s next conversion is projected by the firm to cost
30% less.
In the US, the government has proposed that every major CCS power plant project in
country sells its scrubbed CO2 to the oil extraction industry, according to a new report
from Greenpeace US.
This isn’t a new thing, CO2 augmented oil recovery has been going on stateside since the
1980s and back in 2004 the sector’s demand for CO2 even outstripped supply.
Indeed the soundest financial case for CCS is EOR, because it makes little sense
otherwise. Using EIA estimates, Greenpeace US found that, per unit of electricity, CCS
would cost nearly 40% more per kg of avoided carbon dioxide vs solar, 125% vs wind and
260% vs geothermal.
How ‘clean’ this process is depends on whether the gas used is stored indefinitely and
whether it allows access to oil reserves which may not otherwise have been burnt.

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In the US, CCS may not have any climate benefit at all – it may even increase emissions
overall by giving access to oil which, without the gas, would otherwise stay in the
ground.
One analysis claims that up to 185% more oil per well can be extracted using CO2
injection.
CCS advocates argue that EOR using captured carbon dioxide is the lesser of a number
of evils, including oil exploration in the Arctic or the development of tar sands. That’s of
course assuming oil and gas companies pursue reserves that conflict with climate change
targets.
Enhanced Oil Recovery is already being done in the US, UK and other places by injecting
different gases, chemicals, desalinated water, or using thermal processes or even
microbes – captured CO2 is the only one with any sort of climate co-benefit.

(Source: Element Energy)

That’s to say nothing of the technique’s potential environmental risks and impacts. The
In Salah project in Algeria, one of the few large-scale CCS projects in the world, shut
down indefinitely back in 2011 because the CO2 injection itself caused seismic activity
that cracked the cap rock – also highlighting the challenge of storing a gas indefinitely.
And in the US, where there are already 12 million oil and gas wells, a quarter of which are
abandoned, uncapped and unmonitored, and where the regulatory system is notoriously
lax, what is the likelihood that CO2 will stay in the ground?
CCS on manufacturing
But whilst CCS faces competition from renewables and nuclear when it comes to
generating power there is another little understood area where projects are being
developed – capturing the emissions from industrial processes.
Think tank Green Alliance last month said: “It’s hard to see how some industries will
decarbonise their process emissions without [CCS].”

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That’s because sectors such as cement manufacture, steel making, paper-making and
chemicals emit CO2 as part of the manufacturing process. Many of them also require
vast amounts of heat; making it hard (and relatively inefficient) for them to run on just
electricity – however clean its generation.
In a recent blog, director of the non-profit Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit Richard
Black said by obsessing over CCS in the power sector, the UK is “shooting at the wrong
target.”
He said: “It’s like one of those diet issues when you spend years being as careful as you
can with the fat, only to learn that fat is good and carbs are the real villain.”
This is a problem because – as BP found in Algeria – there is likely to be only so much
viable space to store vast quantities of gas indefinitely underground so government’s
need to be careful how it’s used.
E3G’s Littlecott told Energydesk: “We have limited access to CO2 storage space and need
to maximise the value of CO2 stored, not the volume. And in that context, CCS on coal
and lignite offers the lowest value per tonne of CO2 stored.”
“A CCS strategy that seeks to maximise social benefits would focus on CCS for industrial
emissions and gas power generation”
The following eight energy-intensive industries together produced more than 80 million
tonnes of CO2 in 2012 – that’s 14% of the total UK emissions from that year.

Department of Business
According to new analysis from the UK’s Department of Business, carbon capture would
enable the steel sector, for instance, to cut its carbon emissions by up to 40% more than
it would without.
If CCS proves viable, it is anticipated it would make up more than 50% of the sector’s
decarbonisation efforts – that’s the difference between cutting 4.5 million tonnes a year
and cutting 8.6 by 2050.
It’s an aspect of CCS that ZEP chairman Sweeney was also keen to stress in an email
conversation with Energydesk, adding that separating the transport and infrastructure
part of the CCS process from the carbon capture itself is “essential for industries to
participate”.

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Yet CCS for industry may also be eclipsed by other technologies. Converting renewable
energy to gas is at an even earlier stage than CCS but is already underway in Germany
and Denmark.
There could be a clean energy future which involves burning fossil fuels and burying the
waste, but the deployment of carbon capture is anything but a done deal.
(Source: http://energydesk.greenpeace.org/2015/04/29/
carbon-capture-and-storage-will-it-ever-work/)

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Article 3:
The grand challenges in carbon capture, utilization, and storage
Written by Berend Smit, Ah-Hyung Alissa Park, Greeshma Gadikota
26 November 2014
Introduction
If we were in a global war against climate change, we would carry out large-scale carbon
capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) (Smit et al., 2014). Some argue that if we fight the
war against climate change via CCUS, this implies that we are promoting the continued
use of fossil fuels instead of replacing fossil fuels by renewable energy such as solar
and wind. At present, the contribution of fossil fuels in our energy supply is over 80%,
while the renewable is only 10% (International Energy Agency (IEA), 2013). Most, if not
all, of the energy scenarios predict an increase in the share of the renewables, but in
absolute numbers the fossil fuels will continue to provide most of our energy needs in
the foreseeable future. This is simply because the growth in renewable energy will not
be able to keep up with our increasing energy demand associated with a growing world
population. In such a scenario, a war against climate change without CCUS implies that
we have to dramatically reduce our current energy consumption, and hence, accept a
dramatic reduction in GDP. Thus, the adaptation of large-scale CCUS might be inevitable
to mitigate ever-increasing CO2 emissions with given population growth predictions.
At present, there are still very few signs of starting a war against climate change soon.
The consequence is that we may significantly overshoot CO2 levels in the atmosphere
before any serious action is taken. In such a scenario, it is very likely that we also need to
deploy technologies that can achieve negative emissions (i.e., direct CO2 capture from
air). In this scenario, the price of carbon will be so high that any technology that uses CO2
as a source of carbon will have such an economic advantage that CO2 will replace fossil
fuels for those applications (e.g., plastics and soaps). Thus, CO2 utilization next to storage
will be an integral component of carbon management.
Carbon Capture
For carbon capture (Wilcox, 2012), it is important to distinguish between stationary
sources (power plants, factories, etc.) and mobile sources (cars, airplanes, etc.) of CO2. At
present, there are no practical solutions for on-board capture CO2 directly from mobile
sources; therefore, we focus in the remainder on capturing CO2 from stationary sources.
Coal-Fired Power Plants
Removing CO2 from gases emitted from stationary sources can be done, using quite
old technology. Most natural-gas contains more CO2 than is allowed to put in pipelines.
Hence, gas companies use the amine scrubbing process developed by Bottoms (1930) to
separate CO2 from methane. A very similar process can be used to remove CO2 from flue
gas. There is very little doubt in the engineering community that this amine absorption
technology can be scaled-up and implemented to capture flue gases. The problem,
however, is that the regeneration of the amine solution and the subsequent compression
of CO2 for transport and geological storage is very energy intensive. As a consequence, a
power plant with carbon capture will not only be more expensive to build, but also will
have reduction in efficiency as high as 35% (Herzog et al., 1993). Research is therefore
focused on increasing the efficiency of the absorption process and on finding alternatives
(e.g., solid adsorption or membranes).
Building a new power plant in which carbon capture would be added from the very
beginning would give more possibilities to optimize the efficiency of combined power

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generation and carbon capture. One such example is oxy-combustion in which coal
is burned with pure oxygen, and CO2 is captured simply by condensing the water. In
oxy-combustion, however, one needs to separate oxygen from the air, which is also an
energy intensive separation. Other alternatives include, chemical looping, and integrated
gasification combined cycle (IGCC), in which coal is converted into syngas, and the
carbon capture process involves separation from H2.
Carbon Capture from Dilute Sources
Thermodynamics tells us that the lower the concentration of CO2, the more expensive it
is to capture a ton of CO2 (House et al., 2011; Wilcox, 2012). Hence, most carbon capture
effort has been initially focused on flue gas streams from coal-fired power plants, which
contain about 15% CO2. As coal was the cheapest source of fossil fuel for many years,
such an objective made perfect sense. However, the scenarios did not forecast the
availability of large amounts of cheap natural gas in recent years. Replacing coal-fired
power plants by gas-fired power plants will significantly reduce CO2 emissions, but the
scenario of burning all natural-gas reserves without CCS is only marginally less disastrous
compared to burning all coal without CCS.
In the recent IPCC report (Stocker et al., 2013), the importance of negative emissions has
been established. According to the most recent IPCC report, however, we are currently
emitting more CO2 than predicted by the most pessimistic IPCC scenario. Therefore, it
is more than likely that we will overshoot the target CO2 levels. In such a scenario, one
may need technologies to actively mitigate the effects of climate change (Shepherd,
2009), which involves land management practices, accelerated weathering, albedo
modification, etc., and also technologies to reduce carbon levels from the atmosphere
(Keith, 2009; Lackner et al., 2012).
At present, one can achieve negative emissions by co-firing excess biomass in a coal-fired
power plant and capturing the CO2 together with the CO2 from the coal. This Bio-energy
CCS (BECCS) scheme has an environmental advantage that the flue gas of the biomass
is cleaned using the existing infrastructure of the coal-fired power plant (Gough and
Upham, 2011). However, there is not enough disposable biomass that this can be applied
on a large-scale.
Utilization
In the context of flue gases, CO2 is seen as a waste product. However, there are many
applications, where CO2 is utilized or considered as a valuable commodity.
Enhanced Oil Recovery
At present, CO2 is most valuable for enhanced oil recovery (EOR). In 2008, in the United
States, about 80% of CO2 for EOR is obtained from natural resources and the rest is from
anthropogenic sources such as coal gasification or gas processing (Advanced Resources
International (ARI), 2010). The permanent storage of CO2 in depleted oil fields is definitely
one of the attractive carbon storage options. The fact that there is a market for CO2 is an
important incentive to develop more efficient carbon capture technologies, such that
anthropogenic CO2 can compete with CO2 from natural reservoirs.
There are two practical issues. Firstly, the total amount of CO2 that can be used for EOR is
much less than the total emissions of CO2, which implies that EOR can only be a partial
solution. For example, CO2 used in EOR operations was limited to only 60 million tons
(Advanced Resources International (ARI), 2010). Secondly, one may wonder whether EOR
gives a net CO2 reduction. The argument is that because of EOR we produce more oil,

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and hence, further increase anthropogenic CO2 emissions. However, a better argument
is to compare one barrel of oil produced with EOR compared to one barrel of oil that is
produced without EOR. In this comparison, one barrel of oil with EOR gives a lower CO2
emission as a fraction of the CO2 used to recover the oil stays in the reservoir. However,
here we did assume that the other barrel of oil does remain in the reservoir and that EOR
does not increase the demand for oil.
CO2 to Chemicals
If we look at the current chemical industry, about 7% of all oil is used as feedstock
for carbon in products ranging from plastics to soaps. Replacing oil by a renewable
feedstock is an important long-term challenge of the chemical industry. The viability
of using CO2 as a chemical feedstock is considerably improved if the price of carbon
is sufficiently high such that CO2 can replace oil. While the carbon-free energy sources
required for CO2-to-chemical technologies (e.g., solar and wind) are still expensive for
such CO2 utilization schemes, the research and development of those CO2 conversion
pathways should be developed now to prepare for our rapidly changing future.
CO2 to Fuels
The challenge with upgrading CO2 to a fuel is that it requires energy. As it does not
make any sense to use fossil fuels for this process, we assume that we will use renewable
energy. The first argument is, if we have renewable energies we should primarily use this
for generating electricity. However, this leaves us with two problems: storage of energy
and transportation fuels.
An important advantage of fossil fuels is their high energy density. Renewable energies
such as wind or solar require large-scale energy storage to ensure that electricity
can be produced at time in which there is no wind or sun. Sometimes, this energy
storage can be as simple as pumping water, but not all countries have this option. For
example, Denmark has an excess of wind energy during the winter, but too little during
summer. The idea is to use methanol to store the excess energy in the winter and use
a conventional power plant with carbon capture in the summer. In this cycle, efficient
conversion of CO2 into a fossil fuel like methanol is an essential step.
Incorporating CO2 into Construction and Building Materials
The cement industry produces about 7% of CO2 emissions and is the second largest
emitter of CO2 after coal-fired power plants (International Energy Agency Greenhouse
Gas R&D Programme (IEA-GHG), 2002). Replacing 10% of building materials with
carbonate minerals is expected to reduce CO2 emissions by 1.6 Gt/year, which is
about 5% of the global CO2 emissions as of 2011 (Sridhar and Hill, 2011). However, it is
important to determine the correct composition of carbonate minerals to be included in
the concrete matrix to reduce issues related to mechanical strength of the materials.
Storage
Given the enormous amounts of CO2 we are emitting, it is difficult to imagine any form of
carbon storage other than injecting into geological formations. Appropriate geological
formations such as deep saline aquifers, depleted oil and gas fields, unmineable coal
seams, and silicate formations (e.g., basalt) can accommodate up to 11,000 Gt CO2
(Dooley et al., 2006), which is much greater compared to the annual CO2 emissions, which
are to the order of 30 Gt of CO2/year. In addition, from our experience with EOR we know
how to transport and inject CO2 in geological formations. The challenge is, however, the

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scale. At present, only about 50 Mt CO2 has been stored today and 13 Mt CO2/year is
expected by 2016 given plans in place for additional projects (Levina et al., 2013).
However, the scientific challenge is to ensure that the CO2 remains safely in these storage
sites for thousands of years. Development of technologies for monitoring, verification,
and assessment (MVA) to ensure that the CO2 remains trapped underground is essential.
While the process of injecting CO2 is well understood, the cost of monitoring the fate of
injected CO2 over many years may be too prohibitive unless, the cost of deploying MVA
technologies is substantially reduced. In addition, key questions related to long-term
safety such as induced seismicity and the potential for forming fractures need to be
addressed, which constitute an important aspect of risk assessments of geologic storage.
Ideally, mineralizing CO2 into the form of a carbonate (e.g., limestone, magnesite) will
reduce the amount of mobile CO2 that needs to be monitored. However, the kinetics
of this natural process may be on the order of geological timescales. An active area of
research is to enhance this mineralization process (Gadikota et al., 2014).
Outlook
Given all the uncertainties, we argue that the first, and arguably, the most important
challenge is to ensure that research is carried out on all aspects of CCUS. To reduce CO2
levels in the atmosphere, land management and bio-energy with CCS (BECCS) may
be low-hanging fruit. We can further envision capture technologies that are highly
optimized for point sources ranging from coal-fired and gas-fired power plants to cement
plants as well as direct air capture. The parasitic energy consumption should be lowered
and the long-term recyclability of the CO2 capture medium should be achieved. Cutting-
edge research in carbon storage and utilization (i) will improve our understanding of the
long-term effects of large-scale injection of CO2 in geological formation, (ii) will enable us
to develop alternatives for geological storage such as carbon mineralization, and (iii) will
even allow for the development of the innovative chemistry to convert CO2 into synthetic
fuels and chemicals.
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(Source: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fenrg.2014.00055/full)

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