BC’s burgeoning CO2 emissions problem
117 Tcf — one hundred seventeen trillion cubic feet. That’s the amount of confirmed extractible shale gas in northeastern BC’s Horn River Basin, the largest unconventional gas field in Canada. Raw shale gas from the basin contains about 10—12% CO2 (much higher than the 2-4.5% for conventional gas in BC). The processing of this raw gas could release some 600 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. From all sources (industry, transportation, etc.), BC annually emits about 69 million tonnes of CO2. Potential Horn River Basin CO2 emissions thus equal almost nine years of total BC emissions.
This is a huge problem for the BC government: it has legislated a 33% decrease in GHG emissions over 2007 levels by 2020, and targeted an 80% decrease by 2050; it has also collected hundreds of millions of dollars from the natural gas industry for drilling rights and views natural gas as a key economic driver for the province. It’s an equally daunting problem for the province’s natural gas industry, which is currently subject to a carbon tax and in 2012 will face a cap and trade regime.
For obvious environmental and financial reasons, all that CO2 simply can’t be released into the atmosphere. To date, other than small-scale enhanced oil recovery, carbon sequestration is the only solution being proffered. But carbon sequestration is only a partial solution — at best. Geological formations in the region can accommodate but a fraction of the emissions and costs are punishing. Carbon sequestration? “Cash sequestration” is more like it.
A solution
Rather than sequester carbon, a better solution is to recycle it — to make something useful out of it. This is exactly what Blue Fuel Energy plans to do: use waste CO2 to produce methanol — clean-burning, renewable, low-carbon Blue Fuel Methanol. The concept is simple — and proven. The roots of CO2-based methanol reach back to 1920s Germany, where the first gas-to-liquids process was developed. In the 1990s, prize-winning scientist George Olah (USC) extended the concept, propounding the use of renewable electricity and CO2 to produce methanol.In 2009 Mitsui Chemicals' Osaka Works plant became the first site in the world to synthesize methanol from its CO2 exhaust, and in 2011 Carbon Recycling International commissioned the world's first commercial CO2-based methanol plant. Blue Fuel Energy is planning to be amongst the next producers of renewable methanol.