Introductión to Carbon Capture and Sequestration 1

The Berkeley Lectures on Energy – Vol. 1

Introduction to Carbon Capture and Sequestration

P911_9781783263271_tp.indd 1 2/1/14 10:08 am

The Berkeley Lectures on EnergyISSN: 2054-4189

Vol. 1: Introduction to Carbon Capture and Sequestrationby Berend Smit, Jeffrey A. Reimer, Curtis M. Oldenburg andIan C. Bourg

ICP Imperial College Press

Berend SmitJeffrey A. Reimer

University of California, Berkeley, USA

Curtis M. OldenburgIan C. Bourg

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA

Introduction to Carbon Capture and Sequestration

The Berkeley Lectures on Energy – Vol. 1

P911_9781783263271_tp.indd 2 2/1/14 10:08 am

Published by

Imperial College Press57 Shelton StreetCovent GardenLondon WC2H 9HE

Distributed by

World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.5 Toh Tuck Link, Singapore 596224USA office: 27 Warren Street, Suite 401-402, Hackensack, NJ 07601UK office: 57 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HE

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataSmit, Berend, 1962– author.

Introduction to carbon capture and sequestration / by Berend Smit (University of California,Berkeley, USA), Jeffrey A. Reimer (University of California, Berkeley, USA), Curtis M. Oldenburg(Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA) & Ian C. Bourg (Lawrence Berkeley NationalLaboratory, USA).

pages cm. -- (The Berkeley lectures on energy ; vol. 1)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-78326-327-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) --ISBN 978-1-78326-328-8 (softcover : alk. paper)

1. Carbon sequestration. 2. Separation (Technology) I. Reimer, Jeffrey A., author.II. Oldenburg, Curtis M., author. III. Bourg, Ian C., author. IV. Title.

TP156.S45S62 2014660'.2842--dc23

2013046563

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2014 by Imperial College Press

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form or by any means,electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrievalsystem now known or to be invented, without written permission from the Publisher.

For photocopying of material in this volume, please pay a copying fee through the Copyright ClearanceCenter, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. In this case permission to photocopyis not required from the publisher.

In-house Editor: Lee Xin Ying

Typeset by Stallion PressEmail: [email protected]

Printed in Singapore

v

b1699 Introduction to Carbon Capture and Sequestration

Contents

Preface vii

Acknowledgments xi

About the Authors xiii

Chapter 1 Energy and Electricity 1Chapter 2 The Atmosphere and Climate Modeling 47Chapter 3 The Carbon Cycle 101Chapter 4 Introduction to Carbon Capture 141Chapter 5 Absorption 163Chapter 6 Adsorption 231Chapter 7 Membranes 281Chapter 8 Introduction to Geological Sequestration 355Chapter 9 Fluids and Rocks 381Chapter 10 Large-Scale Geological Carbon Sequestration 457Chapter 11 Land Use and Geo-Engineering 519Chapter 12 List of Symbols 543Chapter 13 Credits 547

Glossary 551

Answers 571

Index 577

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vii


Preface

Sustainable energy generation is one of the biggest challenges of our generation. All long-term solutions rely on direct or indirect conversion of solar energy. However, these solutions appear to be years from imple-mentation. In the coming decades then, while the relative importance of fossil fuels will decrease, absolute use of fossil fuels will not. Whether we like it or not, we simply won’t be able to transition overnight to a world that is carbon neutral for its energy. Although the best way of sequester-ing carbon is to leave fossil fuels in the ground, this is not realistic, and sober consideration of the problem demands an alternative involving drastically lower carbon emissions from fossil fuels during a relatively short transition period to carbon-free energy. However, there is in our view a substantial gap between our hope for a fast transition to sustain-able energy and the energy scenario that is in fact most likely to emerge. As researchers, we simply have very little control on how much coal the world may decide to burn. Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS), employed on a global scale, can sustain a transition period in the world’s energy use and help mitigate alarmingly high CO2 levels in the atmos-phere. Some may argue that this technology will provide the excuse to prolong the use of fossil fuels. Others, including us, argue that we need all the help we can get in reducing CO2 emissions, and that by imple-menting CCS we can exploit an already available fossil fuel infrastructure. The latter viewpoint may be less idealistic, but given the enormous scale of the current fossil fuel infrastructure, it is a more pragmatic approach.

UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have large research programs addressing the world’s energy future. The Berkeley Energy Lectures are aimed at introducing these research programs to our undergraduate and graduate students in the sciences and engineering. In

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viii Introduction to Carbon Capture and Sequestration


the present text, the topics include discussion of our current understand-ing of CO2 in and around the planet, the geological storage of CO2, and the science and technology of capturing CO2.

If you glance through the book, you will quickly see that the lectures are very different from a typical science or engineering course. The book covers relevant topics in the geosciences, climate science, chemical engineering, materials science, and chemistry. The text covers topics as diverse as how to estimate the number of gigatonnes of carbon dioxide that can be stored in a geological formation; how to use a molecular model of pore architecture to optimize the performance of a membrane; what insights can be gained from the planetary science question known as the faint young star paradox; and how to consider the importance of heat integration in amine scrubbing.

Is it important that students know about all these ostensibly dispa-rate topics? For us, this is completely the wrong question. The real ques-tion is “Why would someone interested in science and energy not want to know all this?” When our graduate students talk about their research and people realize it is about CCS, the questions they are likely to get are along the lines of “Is it really safe to sequester CO2?”; “Is CO2 really caus-ing global warming?”; and “How much will CCS infl uence the cost of electricity?” One answer to these questions is, “I have no idea. I am working on quantum chemical calculations to determine the binding energy of CO2 in molecular organic frameworks.” This answer is not acceptable for us. Our students have to realize that research on energy has the potential to impact people’s daily lives and any researcher in this fi eld must be aware of this. It is therefore incumbent on our researchers to know the state of the art in the entire fi eld of CCS, even if their research is as fundamental as developing a novel experimental NMR method to unravel the dynamics of CO2 hopping from one site to another in a cap-ture material! Even more importantly, our researchers need to appreciate that these are very diffi cult problems. We may not even know what the solutions are, but what will be clear from this book is that any solution requires a concerted effort of researchers in many different disciplines. For such a collaboration to work, one does need to know the basics of each relevant discipline and what drives research progress in each fi eld. If a chemist develops a beautiful new material, she has to realize that her material will be used to separate many megatonnes of CO2. The chapters on separations will help her get some insight into what engineers con-sider important in materials for separations. For her to value her new

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Preface ix


material, she also needs to see how and why CO2 molecules ultimately become incorporated into limestone.

Finally, we should warn the readers: this text is not a typical survey that glances over topics. Admittedly, some of the topics will be easy to understand, but not always. If we get really excited about a topic, we discuss the results of the most recent scientifi c publications in the fi eld. In some cases we could not resist introducing some new ideas that have not yet been published! We strongly feel that the combination of a molec-ular understanding translated by chemists into molecules and fully inte-grated with clever engineering and the geological sciences, together with a sense of the scale of the energy landscape, is what will defi ne the next generation of scientists. And we hope you will be one of them.

The Campanile Bell Tower of UC Berkeley.

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xi


Acknowledgments

First of all we would like to acknowledge our colleagues who contributed guest lectures during the course, as much of the material you will fi nd in this book is based on these lectures: Gary Rochelle (UT Austin), Joan Brennecke (Notre Dame), Hongcai Zhou (Texas A&M), Bill Collins, Christer Jansson, Don DePaolo, Jonathan Ajo-Franklin, Sergi Molins, Jiamin Wan, Alejandro Fernandez-Martinez, Tim Kneafsey, Seiji Nakagawa (all from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), Ronny Pini (Stanford), Dave Luebke (National Energy Technology Laboratory), Abhoyjit Bhown (Electric Power Research Institute), Richard Baker (Membrane Technology and Research), Kurt Zenz House (C12 Energy), Jeffrey Long, and Ron Cohen (UC Berkeley).

We are very grateful for the editorial support from Aster Tang and Teresa Chin, and Richard Martin for preparing several of the fi gures. Special thanks go to Marjorie Went for her critical reading and editing of the entire book, as well as for many useful suggestions.

This book is based on the research of the authors and for this Berend Smit and Jeffrey Reimer would like to acknowledge support of the Center for Gas Separations Relevant to Clean Energy Technologies (http://www.cchem.berkeley.edu/co2efrc/), an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the US Department of Energy, Offi ce of Science, Offi ce of Basic Energy Sciences under Award Number DE-SC0001015. Curtis M. Oldenburg receives the majority of his research support from the Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy, Offi ce of Sequestration, Hydrogen, and Clean Coal Fuels, through the National Energy Technology Laboratory,

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xii Introduction to Carbon Capture and Sequestration


US Department of Energy. Ian C. Bourg would like to acknowledge sup-port from the Center for Nanoscale Control of Geologic CO2 (http://esd.lbl.gov/research/facilities/ncgc/), an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the US Department of Energy, Offi ce of Science, Offi ce of Basic Energy Sciences under Award Number DE-AC02-05CH11231.

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xiii


About the Authors

Berend Smit ([email protected]) studied Chemical Engineering and Physics at the Technical University in Delft (The Netherlands). His PhD is in chemistry at Utrecht University. He worked at Shell Research in Amsterdam before he became Professor of Computational Chemistry at the University of Amsterdam. He was elected director of the Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique Moléculaire (CECAM) in Lyon. At present, he works in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and

Department of Chemistry at UC Berkeley, where he is directing an Energy Frontier Research Center for the US Department of Energy (DOE) focused on Carbon Capture. Berend’s research interests are in the development and applications of molecular simulation techniques.

More details on his research can be found on his homepage: http://www.cchem.berkeley.edu/molsim/personal_pages/berend/

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xiv Introduction to Carbon Capture and Sequestration


Jeffrey Reimer ([email protected]) received his degrees in chemistry from UC Santa Barbara and Caltech. After a postdoc at IBM Yorktown Heights, he joined the faculty at UC Berkeley where he is the C. Judson King Endowed Professor of Chemical Engineering. Professor Reimer is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society and has won every teaching award given on the UC Berkeley campus. His research is

focused on NMR spectroscopy, with particular attention to its design for, and application to, problems in materials physics and chemistry.

For details, visit his homepage: http://india.cchem.berkeley.edu/~reimer/

Curtis M. Oldenburg ([email protected]) received his degrees in geology from UC Berkeley and UC Santa Babara with emphasis on igneous petrology and modeling magma dynamics. He came to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in 1990 as a post-doc and worked on model development and applications for strongly coupled fl ow prob-lems in geothermal energy and vadose zone hydrogeology. When geologic carbon seques-tration research began in the late 1990s, he applied his experience with coupled fl ow

problems to specialize in modeling and simulation of CO2 injection, trap-ping, leakage, and related risk assessment. Curt is the Head of the Geologic Carbon Sequestration Program at LBNL, and Editor in Chief of the Wiley journal, Greenhouse Gases: Science and Technology.

For more information, visit his webpage: http://esd.lbl.gov/about/staff/curtisoldenburg/

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About the Authors xv

Ian C. Bourg ([email protected]) received his bachelor’s degree in Industrial Process Engineering from the National Institute of Applied Sciences in Toulouse (France) and his doctorate in Civil and Environmental Engineering from UC Berkeley. In 2009, he joined the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Since 2011, he has served on the executive committee of the Center for Nanoscale Control of Geologic CO2, a DOE-supported Energy Frontiers Research Center.

The goal of Dr. Bourg’s research is to develop a fundamental under-standing of the properties of water at interfaces by using atomistic simu-lations and continuum-scale models. At the present time, his group is investigating the nanoscience of geologic carbon sequestration, the aquatic geochemistry of nanoporous media, and the molecular scale origin of kinetic isotope effects.

More details on his research can be found on his homepage: http://esd.lbl.gov/about/staff/ianbour g/

The authors blissfully unaware of the amount of CO2 in the air.

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1

b1699 Introduction to Carbon Capture and Sequestrationb1699 I t d ti t C b C t d S t ti

Chapter 1

Energy and Electricity

In this chapter we will be counting carbon atoms. How many carbon atoms do we emit each year? How many of those can we capture? The questions are simple but the answers are enormous. How enormous? That is the topic of this chapter.

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Introductión to Carbon Capture and Sequestration 1

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