China plans carbon capture trial
A BHP vice-president has discussed plans for the $10 million steel plant program with Beijing.
Planning is getting under way in China for a trial at a steel plant of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology that promises to reduce dramatically the greenhouse gas emissions from steelmaking.
Fiona Wild, BHP’s vice-president of sustainability and climate change, recently visited Beijing for meetings to discuss such plans.
She is a member of the advisory panel of a CCS research program at Peking University on which that the company is spending about $A10 million over three years, with a focus on the steel industry in which China is by far the largest player.
The first year of that research has concluded that the costs of capturing carbon dioxide at a steel plant in China are lower than in most of the rest of the world — making it an appropriate location for a pilot project.
Baosteeel, one of the biggest buyers of Australian iron ore and metallurgical coal in the world, is among the companies participating in the research.
Dr Wild said that the International Energy Agency believes that it will be necessary to build about 5.1 billion tonnes of annual CCS capacity by 2040 to meet the targets of the Paris Climate Accord.
She told The Australian that CCS is a proven technology, which can be applied to power generation, oil and gas processing, and steel and cement making. But its price has proven the chief barrier to its widespread application.
“We are trying to form partnerships with academics and governments and other companies to try and push CCS down the cost curve. The work here to date has been very successful, I’m very pleased with what I’ve seen.”
She said it was important to develop nationally co-ordinated responses to the emissions challenges, and to encourage broader deployment of new technologies to meet those challenges.
“We are now identifying economic and policy hurdles” to such deployments. But the economic analysis that has emerged during the first year of the Chinese project has been “really heartening,” she said.
The demand for steel is not diminishing, Dr Wild said, with China’s Belt and Road Initiative and many other infrastructure developments under way.
About 18 large-scale CCS projects are under way around the world, she said.
“The technological viability has been proven, and could be applied after steel and cement making to other industrial processes over time.
“People are already capturing it, transporting it and storing it. The challenge is to integrate those three elements, at scale and at cost.”
Dr Wild said that “the role of renewables for the power sector is fine, but it’s not the whole answer” for all emissions, including from other industrial processes. “If we’re going to address climate change, CCS is an important option” — one that could involve the ultimate use of more than half of BHP’s own output.
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