Home » UK partners with Chinese company to capture, utilize and store carbon dioxide

UK partners with Chinese company to capture, utilize and store carbon dioxide

1 million tons of CO2 a year to come from Chinese coal-fired plant

LEXINGTON, Ky. (July 15. 2014) — The University of Kentucky has entered into an agreement with a major Chinese petrochemical conglomerate to develop technologies to capture, utilize and store 1 million tons of carbon dioxide per year from a coal-fired power plant in Dongying, Shandong, China.

CAER's Kunlei Liu and Rodney Andrews attended a signing ceremony July 8 in Dongying, Shandong, China.
CAER’s Kunlei Liu and Rodney Andrews attended a signing ceremony July 8 in Dongying, Shandong, China.

The agreement, between UK’s Center for Applied Energy Research (CAER) and the Sinopec Corporation’s Shengli Oilfield Company and Petroleum Engineering Construction Corporation, is a project of the joint U.S.-China Climate Change Working Group (CCWG) as part of its Carbon Capture, Use, and Storage (CCUS) initiative. Preliminary work on the project began in 2012, and work is scheduled to continue through 2017.

The purpose of the project, with an estimated total investment of $320-400 million, is to develop a series of technologies to capture, transport, store and monitor carbon dioxide, along with technologies for by-product stream cleanup and carbon dioxide enhanced oil recovery. The project will also provide basic data and operational experience to promote industry application process development.

Carbon dioxide will be captured from coal-derived flue gas at the Shengli power plant’s third-stage 600-megawatt generating unit. The project involves chemical absorption, compression and dehydration of carbon dioxide, and its transport over some 50 miles (80 km) of pipeline to the Shengli Oilfield for injection and storage.

The capacity of capture and transportation is targeted at 1 million tons per year. Carbon dioxide enhanced oil recovery and storage will be developed over two stages with a targeted injection rate of 350,000 tons per year in the first stage, and 650,000 tons per year in the second.

UK’s contribution, led by Kunlei Liu, CAER’s associate director for research in power generation and utility fuels, will focus on research in solvent purification technology, wastewater treatment and carbon dioxide capture system development and integration.

Other collaborators include Peking University, North China Electric Power University, Institute of Rock and Soil Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the China University of Petroleum.