Drax Power Station is to pilot the first bioenergy carbon capture storage (BECCS) project of its kind in Europe.
Drax will partner with Leeds-based C-Capture and invest £400,000 in what could be the first of several pilot projects undertaken at the north Yorkshire plant to deliver BECCS demonstrators.
Drax Power Station became the largest decarbonisation project in Europe by upgrading its existing facilities to burn wood pellets in place of coal. If the pilot is successful, Drax will examine options for a similar re-purposing of existing infrastructure.
The first phase of the project will investigate whether C-Capture’s solvent is compatible with the biomass flue gas at Drax Power Station. A lab-scale study into the feasibility of re-utilising the flue gas desulphurisation (FGD) absorbers at the power station will also be carried out to assess potential capture rates.
FGD equipment reduces sulphur emissions from coal, but has become redundant on three of the generating units at Drax that have been upgraded to use biomass, which produces lower levels of sulphur.
Depending on the outcome of a feasibility study, the C-Capture team will proceed to the second phase of the pilot in the autumn, when a demonstration unit will be installed to isolate the carbon dioxide produced by the biomass combustion.
Will Gardiner, CEO, Drax Group, said: “If the world is to achieve the targets agreed in Paris and pursue a cleaner future, negative emissions are a must – and BECCS is a leading technology to help achieve it.
“This pilot is the UK’s first step, but it won’t be the only one at Drax. We will soon have four operational biomass units, which provide us with a great opportunity to test different technologies that could allow Drax, the country and the world, to deliver negative emissions and start to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
C-Capture is a spin-out from the Department of Chemistry at Leeds University, established through funding from IP Group.
Chris Rayner, founder of C-Capture and Professor of Organic Chemistry at Leeds University, said: “We have developed fundamentally new chemistry to capture CO2 and have shown that it should be suitable for capturing the carbon produced from bioenergy processes.
“The key part is now to move it from our own facilities and into the real world at Drax. Through the pilot scheme we aim to demonstrate that the technology we’ve developed is a cost-effective way to achieve one of the holy grails of CO2 emissions strategies – negative emissions in power production, which is where we believe the potential CO2 emissions reductions are likely to be the greatest.”
A report by the Energy Technology Institute in 2016 has suggested that by the 2050s BECCS could deliver roughly 55 million tonnes of net negative emissions a year in the UK, which is approximately half the nation’s emissions target.
Responding to today’s announcement, Almuth Ernsting from Biofuelwatch said: “It is highly ironic that Europe’s first ever BECCS project will involve capturing some of the CO2from a plant that burns vast quantities of wood from clearcut carbon-rich and biodiverse forests.
“A stable climate needs more, not less, thriving forest ecosystems, which play a vital role in regulating rainfall cycles and sequestering carbon. Drax’s announcement illustrates the fallacy of the idea that BECCS can save us from catastrophic climate change.”
While we should all welcome development work that might provide future benefits, the application at Drax is surely a very questionable one (subsidy over substance?).
Firstly, Drax is under much criticism for its subsidy-based wood burning: the concept of re-growing the carbon is seriously flawed political-science. It is clear that if Drax were burning coal it would release less kg/h actual CO2 per MWh generated.
Secondly, as our AGW obsessed government’s policy-drive is to zero carbon (probably with zero heavy industry too), would it not be more sensible to look at recovery from the gas turbines and gas engines that will be the main generators in the near future on the numerous windless and sunless hours of the year?
Even as a “global-warming denier”, I do welcome growing trees and burning forestry waste efficiently: but pelletising this and transporting it over the Atlantic defies all sense.
The Drax Power Station makes more carbon pollution than burning coal. This situation illustrates how politics and engineering do not mix. We were all set in 2010 to pipe the carbon into empty wells in the North Sea. But Cameron cancelled the project.