Page 9 - EurOil Week 46

EurOil COMMENTARY EurOil

South Africa is at the
forefront of carbon
capture development in
Africa.

gas (GHG) intensity by 25% by 2030, while CCS scheme: a group of pilot facilities off the
its 800,000 tpy Al Reyadah CCUS facility is coast of Rio de Janeiro. These facilities, located
expected to grow rapidly with a target in place to aboard four floating production, storage and
capture 5mn tpy of CO2 by the same date. off-loading (FPSO) vessels, capture and inject
Oman has long been leading the pack in CO2 into three oilfields in the offshore San-
terms of EOR and the Sultanate is also develop- tos basin – Lapa, Lula and Sapinhoá. The CO2
ing a commercial-scale hydrogen facility at the injections help maintain reservoir pressure and
port of Duqm as Muscat seeks to diversify its maximise yields while also curbing emissions.
economy away from oil and gas. The CCS project has been in operation since
To the north, however, flaring remains 2013 and has already injected 10mn tonnes of
commonplace in Iraq, though initiatives are CO2 into the fields. Petrobras hopes to bring the
ramping up to monetise gas and reduce emis- total up to 40mn tonnes by 2025.
sions. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that certain The NOC also serves as the head of the Brazil-
international operators developing assets in the ian CCS Network, which published a CO2 stor-
Kurdistan Region of northern Iraq have reported age atlas for the country in 2015. The network
less than 8kg of CO2 equivalent per barrel of oil has also started work on at least 20 CCS research
equivalent (kgCO2e/boe), far below some of the projects with the goal of supporting innovations
region’s top producers. Aramco, for example, in the capture, transport and storage of CO2.
last year reported an upstream carbon intensity
of 10.1 kgCO2e/boe. South Africa
South Africa has been one of the key players in
Latin America carbon capture and storage (CCS) initiatives
Efforts to develop carbon capture and storage in Africa. Its government formed the South
(CCS) capacity are at a relatively early stage African Centre for Carbon Capture & Storage
in Latin America. The two countries in the (SACCCS), a division of the state-owned South
region that show the most promise on this African National Energy Development Institute
front are Mexico and Brazil, which have esti- (SANEDI), in 2009. In turn, SANEDI became a
mated CO2 storage potential of 100bn tonnes member of the Global CCS Institute in 2019.
and 4 trillion tonnes respectively. Both have To date, SACCCS and SANEDI have mostly
explored their options and have launched a focused on investigation of the technical feasi-
number of pilot projects, but Brazil has made bility of proposed CO2 storage options. How-
more progress. ever, they have also launched a Pilot Monitoring
In Mexico, the Energy Ministry suggested in Project (PMP) to build the country’s capacity for
its 2014 “Technology Roadmap on CCS” that CO2 monitoring. The project is in line with the
the government establish a national CCS strat- CCS Roadmap strategy document adopted by
egy and inventory, as well as a centre for techno- the South African cabinet in 2012, and it is due
logical research, development and testing. Since to be followed with a carbon capture pilot plant
then, it has updated the report, identified a num- (CCPP), for which the World Bank will provide
ber of research priorities and proposed several a technical assessment.
exploratory projects. South Africa’s interest in CCS is not limited
Nevertheless, the country has not taken to the public sector. Sasol, which is the coun-
much in the way of action since the 2018 presi- try’s biggest corporate taxpayer, rolled out a
dential election. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, new 10-year carbon transformation plan just
the populist candidate who won that vote, has last week. The company – which happens to be
shelved CCS initiatives, arguing that the Mexi- the operator one of the world’s largest individual
can government does not have the funds needed sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions,
to pursue such projects. the Secunda coal-to-liquids (CTL) plant – is
Meanwhile, Brazil’s national oil company currently in the first phase of its carbon transfor-
(NOC) Petrobras is looking for ways to integrate mation campaign. This plan aims to cut the com-
CCS into its upstream operations. To this end, it pany’s CO2 emissions by 10% on 2017 baseline
has launched Latin America’s only operational levels by 2030. ™

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