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Energy giant's carbon capture technique became a flop

Thursday, 03 January 2013
A technological failure alert has been raised by Swedish state owned energy company Vattenfall where a strategy to capture and store carbon dioxide seem to have failed.

According to Swedish business daily, Vattenfall has added Skr2 billion to capture and store carbon dioxide in its budget but the boast which the company was hoping to gain from its prestigious investment in the future through its technology, CCS, has been described as a flop.

The aim was that CSS would radically reduce the group's large carbon footprint.
For more than a decade, the energy company has become one of Europe's biggest emitter, pressure to reduce the greenhouse emissions had increased. For that reason, Vattenfall implemented and invested in a CCS, carbon capture and storage system.

By separating the carbon dioxide that occurs in a coal-or gas-fired power plants and pumping it down into the bedrock, Vattenfall would contribute in reducing its carbon foot print and help protect the climate. This will thus make the company to become more attractive in bidding for power plants operations that will look futuristic.
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According to the Dagens Industri, though Vattenfall has so far spent around Skr2 billion on CCS, the whole huge investment has been a major disappointment. The main reason is that Germany, where Vattenfall's carbon occurs, has rejected to the storage and thus in practice, to the large-scale use of the technology.

Vattenfall has therfore scrap its plans for a multi-billion projects in German Jänschwalde, including another CCS project in Buggenum in the Netherlands has made Vattenfalls to register impairment of CCS as last year charged to profit over half a billion.

Øystein Løseth, CEO of Vattenfall, believes that the company has taken on too large a share of the responsibility for developing the technology.
"In retrospect, we can conclude that we should have looked closely within the energy dependent companies in the German steel and chemical industries and developed CCS with them, "he writes in Vattenfall's latest sustainability report.

However, Vattenfall has not given up. The experiments in the pilot plant at Schwarze Pumpe in Germany will continue.
"This technology works well and shows unusually few problems so far, "said Karl Bergman, Research Director at Vattenfall. He does not think that Vattenfall has failed.
"Perhaps when it comes to convey how important and significant the technology can be, CCS is a promising and important technology for the world to meet the challenge of limiting carbon dioxide emissions."
From Scandinavian Companies and Market Team

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