Review of CO2 Specifications in Novel Industrial CCS Transportation and Storage Hubs

Abstract Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is considered as one of the major industrial solutions to enable the energy transition. This technology permits to reduce footprint of current carbon intensive industries on the short and medium-term and can be a long-term solution for hard to abate carbon emission sectors. Even if CO2 transportation and storage has been deployed for a few decades, as in Enhanced Oil Recovery applications or for food/medical CO2 applications, CCS sets novel challenges as it implies the development of widespread transportation and storage hubs with multiple CO2 sources coming from different industries. CO2 specification becomes one of the major elements when establishing a CCS chain and necessitate cross discipline efforts covering among other: design requirements (process, flow assurance, thermodynamics), system integrity (corrosion), Health Safety and Environment (HSE), and reservoir, delineating the capture and conditioning facilities to be considered by the source plants. CO2 specification is highly impacted by the transportation mode: ship transportation requires a purity of about 99.5% CO2, while pipeline transportation can allow purity as low as 96% CO2. Moreover, some impurities, such as H2S, NOx, SOx, even at ppm levels, may trigger a set of corrosion mechanism with the risk of impairing the overall integrity of the system. Establishing a CO2 specification for a CCS chain is complex, requiring anticipating (i) the CO2 sources characteristics (ii) the chain characteristics and its operating conditions (iii) the potential impact of impurities in order to establish the best compromise between impurities maximum allowable concentration versus safe CCS chain with optimized design, operations and costs.