Carbon capture set to provide shipping with zero-carbon pathway and cargoes

IT WAS not very long ago that the mention of carbon capture on board ships was met with raised eyebrows and polite incredulity.

For a long time, the associated costs and technical challenges appeared to justify such scepticism. One of the biggest practical issues was what to do with the captured carbon dioxide (CO2).

One proposal was to turn the gas into frozen bomb-shaped blocks and drop them into the oceans, but it wasn’t met with universal approval.

However, things have moved on rapidly since then. There are now numerous projects to lock away CO2 underground. One of them is the Norwegian government-sponsored Longship project, which entails capturing CO2 from industrial sources in the Oslo-fjord region and shipping liquid CO2 from these industrial-capture sites to an onshore terminal. The CO2 can then be sent by pipeline to a storage location under the North Sea.

This marks the start of CO2 becoming cargo for ships. Northern Lights, a joint venture comprising Shell, TotalEnergies and Equinor, is responsible for developing and operating the CO2 transport-and-storage facilities for the project. Phase 1 begins operations this year, with an annual storage capacity of up to 1.5 million tonnes of CO2.

Four 7,500 cubic metre vessels, including two now being built in China’s Dalian Shipbuilding Offshore Co (DSOC) shipyard, have been ordered for the project. The most recent of these is by major German shipowner Bernhard Schulte, which will time-charter the vessel to Northern Lights.

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“Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is a safe and efficient way to handle emissions, and it is critical to meet climate targets,” said Northern Lights’ managing director Borre Jacobsen. “We are excited to see Bernhard Schulte now entering the liquid CO2 business, as strong partnerships are required to succeed. We believe in the tripartite collaboration among Northern Lights, DSOC and Bernhard Schulte.”

The CO2 transported by Northern Lights will mainly be from land-based industrial processes, but onboard carbon capture (OCC) is being developed at pace for the world’s merchant fleet.

For example, the maritime-solutions provider recently received approval in principle from classification society DNV for its OCC system, which runs on absorption of amine, an ammonia derivative.

The Erma First CCS system uses a proprietary amine solvent to absorb CO2 from flue gases. When heated, the chemical reaction that occurs reverses the absorption and separates the CO2 from the solvent. The CO2 that is released is liquefied and stored under cryogenic conditions on board, while the regenerated solvent can be reused. This system adds to the already-wide range of OCC technologies in the pipeline.

Whether OCC is going to be a viable option for shipping is a controversial issue, but a lot of investment is going into developing it.

But there is another way carbon capture could be adopted to help take shipping to net zero – by offsetting greenhouse-gas emissions from ships with CO2 captured by land-based systems. The simplest way to do this is by planting trees.

Until now, offsetting has made little headway in the shipping industry. The International Maritime Organization, in its decarbonisation strategy, does not explicitly include offsetting, but neither does it rule it out.

An announcement last week by Trafigura, a major commodities trader and bunker supplier, may signal that offsetting could become a serious option.

Trafigura has agreed to buy CO2 removal (CDR) credits produced by carbon capture, utilisation and sequestration company 1PointFive at its first industrial-scale Direct Air Capture facility. The facility, named Stratos, is now being built in Texas.

Trafigura says that the deal is its “first transaction towards meeting its commitment as a founding member of the First Movers Coalition, to purchase at least 50,000 tonnes of durable and scalable net carbon dioxide removal credits generated through advanced CDR technologies by 2030”.

The Stratos plant is designed to capture up to 500,000 tonnes of CO2 annually when fully operational and is expected to be the largest facility of its kind in the world. The captured CO2 is to be stored through “durable subsurface saline sequestration”.

Trafigura says: “The agreement paves the way for the broader adoption of 1PointFive’s CDR credits to help hard-to-abate industries address their emissions.” Surely shipping must fall into the “hard-to-abate” category.

Finally, as an example of the different technical approaches aimed at reducing shipping’s carbon footprint, Italian classification society Rina has issued full type approval for a stand-alone retrofit design that uses hydrogen to reduce emissions and improve fuel efficiency on marine engines.

Its manufacturer Ecomotus says the EcoPro system “intelligently optimises the engine’s fuel combustion, continuously monitoring engine requirements and ensuring that very specific quantities of hydrogen are produced at exactly the moment that the engine requires it”.

Apparently, with no requirement for hydrogen storage tanks or high-pressure systems, and with a small footprint, the modular EcoPro can be retrofitted to almost any engine, enabling owners to optimise their fuel burn and reduce their CO2 footprint. It has already been installed on more than 30 marine engines.

Ecomotus’s director of innovation, Jason Munro, says: “The search for safe clean-energy solutions is well underway, but change is not going to happen overnight. The EcoPro bridges the gap between fossil fuels and the future of a hydrogen/electric economy, and offers a way to use hydrogen safely to immediately reduce pollution and improve fuel consumption”.

We could be in for an interesting debate on offsetting. Coupled with the use of sulphur dioxide scrubbers, emissions-reducing technology OCC and, possibly, sufficient CDR credits, it is conceivable that ships could carry on burning high sulphur fuel oil indefinitely and be responsible for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.

That prospect is unlikely to greatly impress the environmental lobby. But if we are going to meet IMO’s decarbonisation targets, pragmatism will have to be the order of the day.