Carbon capture and sequestration

Today, growing concern about greenhouse gas emissions and climate change are profoundly altering the way utilities, businesses and local governments plan for the future. In the utility sector, energy executives now seek to balance availability, reliability, and profitability with sustainability objectives.

KEMA is actively involved in these markets and issues to help our clients address their concerns about climate change and develop innovative solutions.

The capture and storage of CO₂ represents a key means to reducing CO₂ emissions from fossil fired power plants. KEMA offers services over the complete chain of capture, conditioning, compression, transport and storage. And furthermore carbon capture and sequestration is an integral part of the total expertise of KEMA in the field of Carbon & Climate, which extends over the complete energy chain.

Development of technologies for CO₂ capture
The development of technologies for CO₂ capture is a worldwide topic which is actively surveyed by KEMA. This includes existing methods, such as absorption and non selective cooling, as well as new developments such as oxy-fuel, pre-combustion capture, chilled ammonia, membrane separation, cryogenic separation, chemical looping, etc. The impact of these different methods on energy consumption, plant efficiency and costs are determined and evaluated by KEMA from the perspective and requirements of an industrial client or utility as well as from national or international perspectives.

Benchmarking CO₂ capture technologies
Benchmarking the different options for CCS is of great importance in the present transition to a low-carbon power generation. The objectives for benchmarking can originate from different perspectives: either from a high level academic viewpoint (finding the optimal technology for decarbonizing electricity), from a utility (facilitate decision-making for capture technologies) of from technology developers (comparison of performance of different technologies). KEMA offers a general approach for benchmarking of CCS technologies starting with clearly defined criteria and assumptions which are the basis for performing the benchmark and come to well balanced results and comparisons.

Conditioning, Compression and Transport
KEMA’s gas consulting and engineering services are a renown knowledge center for gas infrastructure and gas utilization. With respect to handling the captured CO₂ we focus on three issues: safety, flow dynamics and economic assessment of CO₂ transportation. Regarding these topics we advice clients such as utilities, oil and gas companies, industry, governments (regional, national, EU) and manufacturers of supporting equipment. KEMA participates for example in the Dutch CATO consortium, a 5 year collaboration project between industry and R&D institutions and in the CO2 Europipe project, a European consortium investigating the possibilities of a European CO₂ infrastructure.

Research
KEMA participates in a number of technology development programs and CCS knowledge networks, such as CATO (Dutch government), CAPTECH (Dutch government), Europipe (EU). Furthermore KEMA is a key member in the development project for applying nano structured membranes (NanoGloWa) to CO₂ capture.