System readiness levels

System readiness levels sit above technology readiness levels and are used to assess the maturity of the whole system. The concept of system readiness levels has been used by the UK MOD (MOD, 2008) to evaluate system readiness. In this case the entire CCS system will be assessed in terms of system readiness.

Ranking the CCS system according to its system readiness level allows it to be compared to other generation technologies and enables an identification of the remaining barriers to commercial implementation in a formal framework. For the system to be viable, it must meet all wider system constraints (in this case the generation system). Therefore CCS system readiness is complex and depends on a variety of factors including economic, political, regulatory and technical constraints.

Figure 4-26: Technology development funnel concept

System readiness levels have been shown in the context of the systems V diagram which was developed to assess the state of systems in relation to commercial deployment (Sage and Rouse, 1999), as shown in Figure 4-27. System readiness levels are particularly relevant for CCS as most technology has been developed, but the whole system has yet to be demonstrated and deployed in a commercial environment.

The four stages of the CCS system are generation, capture and compression, transport and storage. It is important to note that the CCS concept will not work unless all aspects of the system are in place.

The three main phases for the CCS system to pass through are research, demonstration and commercialisation. However, experience has shown that the transition from research to commercialisation is where technologies fail; the so called valley of death (Grubb, 2002). Many technologies fail at this point as the system must meet constraints imposed by the wider system i.e. markets, reliability, political and regulatory. Although the ‘valley of death’ concept is usually attributed to TRL’s, it is only when understood in the context of whole system performance and constraints that the concept can be fully understood.

Figure 4-27: Systems V and system readiness level (after (Sage and Rouse, 1999))

Costs increase dramatically as a system approaches system readiness level 9. The integration of sub systems and testing of plant at a commercial scale require far more funding than that required to develop a novel capture process in a lab and therefore carry more risk. For example, the UK government will award around £1 billion to the winner of the CCS competition, while the EU has set aside 500 million emissions allowances and an additional EUR 1billion for six CCS projects as part of the EU recovery package.

The time between SRL’s gets longer as the system comes closer to maturity. The time between the demonstration of CCS at a small scale (~30-50MW) and a demo scale (300MW) is forecast to be around 6 years. The first CO2 capture plants were deployed in 2006 as part of the EU CASTOR project, a 1MW

slipstream, and then 2008 (30MW Schwarze Pumpe and 5MW Pleasant Prarie ). The firm date for the UK competition winner to start operation is 2014. This is partly because of the construction time required to build a demo plant (3-4 years) and transport and storage facilities and the additional complexity involved in addition to the cost. To date, a number of proposed CCS projects have been mothballed or cancelled due to funding issues e.g. Futuregen and Peterhead.

In order to realise a fully integrated, functioning CCS system there will also need to be advances in other areas besides technology performance, demonstration and sub system integration. These areas include economic support, political support, development of a legal framework and public acceptance and development of a supply chain to deliver CCS infrastructure.

Economic support, in the form of government subsidies will be required if CCS is to become a viable generation technology. Compared to a standard coal plant, the increase in capital and operating cost of a CCS system is prohibitive and uncompetitive without some form of subsidy in place. Even if CCS were technically viable at present, long term economic support would be required in order for generators to even consider commissioning a CCS plant and associated transport and storage site.

For this reason, it is also clear that CCS requires political support; especially long term guarantees to support CCS plant economically e.g. a long term carbon price with a floor. Apart from the funding for EU and GB demonstration projects, governments are yet to provide this kind of support to generators.

There is a significant requirement for legal frameworks to be developed to allow an integrated CCS value chain to grow. The two main areas include classification of CO2 as waste (allowing it to be disposed of) and the construction of a legal framework to allow liability for CO2 to be passed from a generator to a transporter and onto a storage company. A framework is also needed to transfer long term liability of the stored CO2 to a (trans) governmental body due to the long periods over which CO2 will be stored. It is also unclear how CO2 can be transported across national boundaries e.g. a plant in the UK sequesters CO2

in Norwegian territorial waters- does the UK government have liability (as emissions are from the UK) or is the Norwegian government to take responsibility (for a fee) and to what extent does this account for UK emissions reductions- at present the CDM allows European countries to offset emissions by developing projects in the developing world. At present there are no legal frameworks in place to support CCS; in fact even the legal framework governing the UK demonstration plant has not yet been published.

Public acceptance is required in order for CCS to become widely adopted. Politicians will be able to pass legislation much more easily if people accept CCS. This also holds for planning issues for CO2 transport across land and storage in aquifers at sea. At present, the public do not have a widespread understanding of the fundamental idea of CCS or how it fits into wider carbon mitigation strategy. This lack of understanding is applicable to several nations, not just the UK (Reiner et al., 2009), (de Coninck et al., 2009).

15 See Appendix 4 for details

Finally, if CCS is to be adopted at a national level, there will need to be sufficient supply chain capacity to deliver the plants, transportation network and storage facilities. This has the potential to be a significant bottle neck- there is likely to be demand for new plant post 2016 (due to the closure of nuclear plant- see Section 2.4) and it will be important to ensure that sufficient skills and resources exist to develop the CCS option. If this does not happen, a similar situation to that seen by the wind developers prior to 2009 could be observed: construction prices will increase (due to excessive demand) so too will lead times for projects as resources are stretched.

4.5.2.1 Results and discussion of system readiness assessment

Table 4-25 presents the system readiness level of the CCS system. Base plant refers to the underlying generation plant type i.e. IGCC, Oxyfuel and PC plant. Both PC plant and IGCC plant have been commercially deployed, while oxyfuel plant has not. Capture and compression are between levels six and seven as they have not been demonstrated fully.

The transport system is at level six as it has been used in the USA for EOR but has not been deployed at the scale required for full implementation of CCS i.e. a full network solution capable of transporting CO2

to storage sites.

Finally, the storage aspect is at level six because it too has not been deployed at the correct level. Projects such as Sleipner, Weyburn, and In-Salah only inject 1Mt of CO2 per year. A full scale CCS plant will produce 5Mt of CO2 per year. The Gorgon project which is projected to start in 2014, will use CO2 in enhanced gas recovery will inject 3Mt CO2 per year and is particularly noteworthy as the Australian government has accepted liability for the stored CO216

. Therefore apart from economic barriers, other significant hurdles are:

Demonstration of the CCS chain at scale i.e. that of whole power plant and large industrial plant;

Managing the transition from single demonstration projects to the global deployment of CCS.

Table 4-25: System readiness levels for the CCS chain (authors own classification)

Process SRL

Base plant 7-9

Capture and Compression 6-7

Transportation 6

Storage 6

This is a suitable point to discuss the role of technology demonstration and how it relates to system readiness. There are three categories of demonstration projects: small scale (1.5MW and above), medium scale (>200MW), and full scale (dependent on plant type). Each of the categories is used for different purposes: the smallest scale can test novel capture processes, medium demonstrates the entire CCS chain, while the full scale brings the system up to the commercial level. The demonstration process,

16 http://.watoday.com.au/wa-news/gorgon-to-lead-nations-biggest-carbon-injection-effort-20090820-es1j.html, “Gorgon to lead nations biggest carbon injection effort”, WA Today. Accessed 10/10/2009.

theoretically, also provides the opportunity to begin the process of developing support for CCS in other areas e.g. regulation, liability framework etc.

Currently, the UK has a CCS demonstration competition, with a winner expected to develop a mid scale plant with transport and storage facilities by 2014. The EU currently has ambitions to finance 12-14 demonstration plants using a mixture of carbon credits and stimulus funding- these plants are likely to be at full commercial scale.

While the UK demo project is likely to be a post combustion plant, the EU demonstration programme will demonstrate all capture technologies, transport modes and storage methods. Appendix 4 (Proposed EU demonstration plants) presents details of proposed projects requiring EU funding by country and plant type. Most of the plants seeking funding are PC plants (9GW), followed by IGCC (4.5GW) and oxyfuel (1.4 GW) with one natural gas plant (0.4 GW) and two CHP plants (0.9GW). It is likely that the UK will be allocated more than one demonstration project from the EU, and there appears to be interest in developing IGCC plants (3 of the 5 plants in the UK are proposed as IGCC). At the time of writing, the EU funds are unallocated. Once published, the choice of demo plant along with the capture process should give a clearer indication of the most promising capture technologies. Other countries outside the EU, notably the USA, Australia and Japan are also pursuing CCS demonstration programmes, however, the level of funding is unclear—recently the USA chose to halt the development of Futuregen, an advanced IGCC plant with CCS.