Mr Peter Godfrey represents Storegga, a company that exists to champion and deliver carbon capture and storage (CCS), hydrogen, and other subsurface renewable projects in the UK and internationally to accelerate carbon emission reductions. Dr. Edris Joonaki is Fluid Properties Expert/Technical Lead at TÜV SÜD UK National Engineering Laboratory. His research works have won several research funds as well as numerous UK and international awards. 

Commencing the proceedings of the day, Mr T K Sengupta, Director – Exploration & Production, FIPI extended a warm welcome to the speakers and participants at the session. He highlighted that the oil and gas companies can use these technologies to generate clean energy by capturing the carbon, carbon sequestration and carbon storage. He further highlighted that Scotland being connected to North Sea is bringing a lot of technological advancements and FIPI will make its endeavour to connect the industries between these two countries for any potential collaboration in the energy transition space.

Mr Kevin Liu, Head of APAC Energy, SDI highlighted in his opening address that SDI is the Scottish Government’s International Economic Agency with a core mission to develop, build and maintain effective global trade and investment partnerships and also to build a collaborative partnership with FIPI. He further highlighted that given the strengths and depths of the India and Scotland’s petroleum industries, there is a lot to work through collective energy transition initiatives and CCS and hydrogen will be a key part of that collaboration. 

Mr Peter Godfrey in his presentation on the “ACORN CCS/ Hydrogen Cluster Project” highlighted the major macro factors driving CCS deployment. Those are :



(i) Political (Climate neutrality, Net Zero, Carbon budgets, etc.)

(ii) Economic (Carbon border taxes, Emissions trading schemes, etc)

(iii) Social (Climate change movements, creating political will, etc)

(iv) Technology (CCS is proven technology, only solution for heat and industry, etc.)

    

He mentioned that Acorn is a low-cost, low-risk carbon capture and storage (CCS) project, designed to be built quickly, taking advantage of existing oil and gas infrastructure and a well understood offshore CO2 storage site. The project is located in north-east Scotland at the St Fergus Gas Terminal – an active industrial site, where around 35% of all the natural gas used in the UK comes onshore. 

He further added that Storegga is interested to work with Indian companies that are looking at CCS opportunities, not only from the point of view of storage sites, but also on optimizing the high emitting sites. The Mumbai high and the geological structures around it suggests a possible focus area where such projects can be carried out in partnership with Storegga.

The next speaker Dr. Edris Joonaki talked about the “Technical aspects of CO2 Process Streams and Sequestration in Reservoirs”. He pointed out that the oil and gas infrastructure such as subsurface reservoirs and transportation pipelines which have suitable capacity and ability, can be used for the CCS processes as well, however, there are some significant challenges associated with this strategy. These are:

  

(i) Accurate CCS flow measurement: When we capture CO2, some impurities such as hydrogen, methane and other components present may give significant errors in the performance of the flowmeters for accurately measurement of CO2

(ii) Such impurities may cause CO2 induced Corrosion problems and CO2 rock dissolution & associated leakage challenges.

He further added that all these challenges are related to the fluid properties of CO2-rich stream, so developing a new tool or model to accurately predict the thermodynamic properties (both density and speed of sound properties) of CO2-rich streams will overcome all these challenges.  

While briefing about the potential CO2 leakages from these storage infrastructures into the environment, he mentioned that again use of a thermodynamic model could successfully predict all such behaviours. Also, before doing any CO2 storage and projects, we need to carefully consider all below factors to avoid any challenges of CO2 leakage into this atmosphere:



(i) Depth of the injection point pressure

(ii) Temperature of the reservoir

(iii) Salinity of the formation of water or aquifer

(iv) Predicting the pH changes when we inject CO2 

(v) Study the potential fluid flow reactive transport of the CO2 streams

The next segment of the session was audience Q&A. For this session, an overwhelming number of questions were received from the audience, which also stood testimony to the audience interest on the subject. The one and a half hour long session witnessed an overwhelming participation by over 100 participants across the oil and gas value chain in the country.

Dr. R K Malhotra, DG FIPI in his closing remarks thanked speakers from SDI for collaborating with FIPI for energy transition topic on CCS and hydrogen. He further added that based on the presentation and discussion on CCS; some of our upstream companies attending the webinar can also focus to find the opportunity of capturing and storing CO2 from the industrial belt along the Bombay high and FIPI and SDI can jointly work and collaborate in this direction.

The session was brought to an end, wishing all speakers and participants the best of health.