Air Products Moves Forward On Carbon Capture Project

Air Products, Valero Energy Corp. and Denbury Onshore, LLC, have signed agreements to proceed with a planned carbon capture and sequestration project in Port Arthur, Texas. Air Products will design, construct and operate a system to capture CO₂ from its two steam methane reformers (SMR) located within the Valero Refinery in Port Arthur. The CO₂ removal technology will be retrofitted to the SMRs, which produce hydrogen to assist in the making of cleaner burning transportation fuels by refinery customers on Air Products’ Gulf Coast hydrogen pipeline network. Approximately 1 million tons of CO₂ annually will be recovered, purified by Air Products, and delivered by Air Products via a pipeline owned by Denbury Green Pipeline-Texas for injection into Denbury Onshore’s enhanced oil recovery projects in Texas. [sidebar id="1"]In June 2010, Air Products announced it was selected to receive $253 million in Phase 2 funding from the United States Department of Energy (DOE) through the National Energy Technology Laboratory under the Industrial Carbon Capture and Sequestration (ICCS) Program for this ICCS project. It has since received an additional $30 million from DOE for the project. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds are being used for final engineering, design, construction and project operation through September 2015. Air Products’ project was the only industrial-gas-company-led undertaking selected by DOE and one of only three projects receiving Phase 2 funds. DOE is providing a total of $284 million, including the funding utilized for Phase 1, or 66% of the over $400 million project. DOE said in its Phase 2 selection announcement that successful development of advanced technologies and innovative concepts reducing CO₂ atmospheric emissions is a key objective of the Obama Administration’s efforts to help mitigate the effects of climate change. The Phase 2 projects selected were aimed at testing large-scale industrial carbon capture and storage (CCS), an important step in moving CCS technology toward eventual commercial deployment. Air Products is currently working on several CCS projects around the world for the power market. These projects include:

• The world’s first full demonstration of oxyfuel carbon capture and sequestration with Vattenfall AB. Air Products has installed its proprietary CO₂ capture, purification, and compression system at Vattenfall’s research and development facility in Schwarze Pumpe, Germany.
• In collaboration with the Alberta Energy Research Institute, a study focusing on advanced CO₂ capture technology for use with gasification.
• In cooperation with DOE, Air Products designed and constructed a CO₂purification system in support of an oxyfuel technology development project at a boiler-simulation facility in Windsor, Conn.
• Air Products demonstrated oxyfuel sour compression technology in experimental work carried out by Imperial College London with flue gas from a 160 kilowatt coal-fired combustion installation at Doosan Babcock’s facility in Renfrew, Scotland, as part of the Oxycoal-UK Project.