据能源世界网3月9日报道,在30多年的石油和天然气业务中,Andy Lane在特立尼达和印度尼西亚等地管理着大型天然气开采和运输设施的建设。
如今,他正在自己的祖国英格兰工作,从事一项复杂而昂贵的事业,其目的基本上是要扭转他在职业生涯的大部分时间里所做的事情。
Lane的最新任务是收集英格兰东北部一组化工厂的碳污染,并将其送往北海深处的一个储蓄地。
这个耗资数十亿美元的项目可能是碳捕捉和存储技术的一个突破。碳捕捉和存储技术的概念已经存在了至少25年,目的是减少工厂排放的破坏气候的碳排放。
这个想法听起来似乎很简单:在污染物逸散到空气中之前转移它们,并将它们深埋在地下,这样它们就不会造成伤害。但是这项技术已经被证明是非常昂贵的,而且它并没有像一些支持者希望的那样迅速流行起来。
尽管如此,碳捕获作为实现2016年《巴黎气候协议》目标的一种方式仍受到了广泛关注。乔·拜登(Joe Biden)总统曾宣传过碳捕捉的承诺;上个月,埃克森美孚宣布了一项30亿美元的低碳投资,包括碳捕获;一周后,埃隆·马斯克(Elon Musk)承诺出资1亿美元,参加一场寻找最佳碳捕捉技术的竞赛。
该项目位于英国蒂斯河(River Tees)沿岸的提赛德(Teesside)地区,由石油巨头英国石油公司(BP)牵头,预计规模将扩大:该地区是英国最大的污染工厂和炼油厂集群之一。通过将它们联系在一起——通过管道收集它们的所有排放物,并向它们收取费用——英国石油公司希望达到足够的规模,使其成为一项有利可图的污染治理业务。
Lane表示,Teesside“在英国有很多巨大的工业排放源,这就是为什么这个项目是有意义的。
郝芬 译自 能源世界网
原文如下:
Oil giants prepare to put carbon back in the ground
During more than three decades in the oil and gas business, Andy Lane has managed the construction of enormous facilities for extracting and transporting natural gas, in places like Trinidad and Indonesia.
Now he is working in his native England, taking on a complex and expensive venture that essentially aims to reverse what he has spent much of his career doing.
Lane’s newest assignment is designed to collect carbon pollution from a group of chemical plants in northeast England and send it to a reservoir deep under the North Sea.
The multibillion-dollar project could be a breakthrough for a technology known as carbon capture and storage, a concept that has been around for at least a quarter-century to reduce the climate-damaging emissions from factories.
The idea sounds deceptively simple: Divert pollutants before they can escape into the air, and bury them deep in the ground where they can do no harm. But the technology has proved to be hugely expensive, and it has not caught on as rapidly as some advocates hoped.
Still, lots of attention is being paid to carbon capture as a way to meet the targets in the 2016 Paris climate agreement. As a candidate, President Joe Biden promoted carbon capture’s promise; last month, Exxon Mobil announced a $3 billion investment in low-carbon efforts, including carbon capture; and a week later, Elon Musk promised to put up $100 million for a contest seeking the best carbon-capture technology.
The project in England, in an area called Teesside along the River Tees, is led by the oil giant BP and expects to have size on its side: The area is home to one of the country’s largest clusters of polluting factories and refineries. By linking them together — collecting all their emissions by pipeline, and charging them a fee — BP hopes to achieve sufficient scale to make a profitable business of tackling their pollution.
Teesside “has quite a lot of the big industrial emissions sources in the U.K., and that is why this project makes sense,” Lane said.