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Dutch IGCC pioneers chalk up pain and gain Emergency response is behind schedule in the European public sector A new refining industry in Europe's Asian Corridor Commission proposes milestone energy proposal Replace fuel oil with distillate? Cancelled projects will sustain margins “Marine distillate not fuel oil from 2010” Branson's biofuels megastore You heard it here first: refinery CO2 storage a reality in Norway Buncefield 2: Investigation critical Where now for Swedish Class 1 diesel My slow awakening to climate change The luckiest motorist alive Safety row goes on over Europe's largest LNG terminal New WHO guidelines on city air quality put focus on diesel Would LNG really 'evaporate harmlessly' in an accident? Another lesson in the thermobaric bomb Spare a thought for the oil-rich But will the good times keep on rolling? Carbon storage and the zero emissions refinery Everything just changed E85 and high octane gasolines The problem of small-minded young engineers New Permit Regulations Biodiesel newbuilds and a new green superfuel Spilled wine and our split industry Drilling down into the prospects for IGCC The beginning of the start of the end of oil | The beginning of the start of the end of oil Here’s a long view, a very long view, on the way hydrocarbon processing for energy and transport may develop over the next 50 years, starting quite possibly with a billion dollars of investment here in Europe by the time this article is printed. It’ll mean gasification as a key technology, coal as a likely refinery feedstock, hydrogen and power as principal products and carbon dioxide separation and storage as an immediate technological challenge. The long view comes from Thom Hartmann’s thought-provoking book The last hours of ancient sunlight (recommended). For 70 million years the second law of thermo dynamics worked away to make our industry possible today. Hydrogen on our sun, the source of all our energy, became helium and 93 million miles away the resulting radiation beamed down on the single continent of Pangaea and powered the greatest hydrocarbon process of all time. Trees grew. Trillions and trillions of tons of cellulose were laid down in a rotting mat sometimes thousands of feet deep, and atmospheric carbon dioxide was captured too in oceans of single-cell algae. Gradually mammalian life became possible as the temperature-retaining carbon-rich atmosphere thinned and cooled. Fast forward 340 million years to around 900 years ago and planet Earth is able to support a world population of 500m humans. The constraint on population is principally energy for warmth and agricultural productivity. We were living on what Hartmann terms “current sunlight” – as captured by forests, grazing animals and game, and burned or cooked in a fireplace or stove. But then things changed. Humans discovered coal and for the first time could tap into that 70 million years-worth of stored ancient sunlight. They were able to cut back forests maintained for fuel and turn them over to crops. Food supplies grew rapidly and with them, by 1800, world population reached one billion. This critical change took planet Earth beyond the population level it could sustain using current sunlight to a new level sustained by stored hydrocarbons. What happened in Titusville, Pensylvania in 1859 and really took hold after the American Civil War enabled human population to double again by 1930 based on the availability of a much more flexible commodity – oil. Today it takes about 12 years to add one billion people to the global population. By simple extrapolation, that puts us at around 80 billion by 2050, but no government or major corporation expects that to happen. Instead, sooner or later we face the uncomfortable (!) transition from the population level which peak oil production can sustain, to the level current sunlight (or think ‘renewable energy’) can sustain. Hartmann suggest that that population is somewhere between a quarter of a billion and one billion people. The five-year, industry reviewed, US Geological Survey with an accompanying analysis by the US Energy Information Administration puts peak oil production at ‘nearer the middle than the beginning of the 21st century’ based on 2% annual demand growth. In 2004, oil demand growth was 3.5%. Producers were working flat out to meet demand, by the way. That $50 oil price was fundamentals, not fear. Taboo Now you may well say that the end of conventional oil is not on your business decision horizon – that’s for our kids to figure out. But what if the era of adjustment just began? What if it’s up to us to engineer a soft landing to the end of the conventional oil boom, starting now? Yep, I know, it’s considered slightly whacko to discuss the end of oil. I experienced that in five year’s chairing the Brussels World Fuels Conference. So thank goodness for global warming. Whether you agree that that small percentage of anthropogenic emissions plays a role in climate change or not, at least it’s got people talking about energy again. Somehow it’s more polite to discuss a change in the weather, than to come right out and say, ‘Look if we don’t create some resilience, flexibility and sustainability in our energy policy, then pre-emptive aggression to secure oil will lead us into world wars 3, 4 and 5.’ Fortunately, we won’t need to get too geopolitical with the executive board about all this, because the market will guide us through it. From here on in and towards peak oil production and beyond, a sweet, easy to process crude is going to cost more. We’ll see more sour, unconventional, stranded, hard to process, hard to mine feedstocks appearing on the refining slate. Already, at $50/bbl, a lot of stuff that was unthinkable a few years ago is getting done. On my local tv station there was a story saying that Europe’s youngest refinery after Leuna, Preem’s Scanraff, already the scene of a EUROS 350m hydrocracker construction, is in the market for an IGCC (Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle) plant. They say they’re just doing some blue sky thinking, yet there’s a buzz about it in the business all the same. Gdansk refinery in Poland has been on the record for some time now that it will combine its hydrocracker with an IGCC and the word is that’s going ahead now. In my view, these moves aren’t about the clean fuels era. Sulphur limits on oil for power play into this, but IGCC fits more powerfully into a long-term trend towards sour, solid and unconventional feeds, rising utility costs and even possibly the emergence of hydrogen as a consumer fuel product. You can do a lot of things with an IGCC, you can take almost any feedstock, and produce power. You can also produce gases: hydrogen, and inevitably a lot of carbon dioxide. Combine the IGCC with CO2 storage underground and you have a technology that can withstand the end of conventional oil, while mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and benefiting from trading arrangements, as well as providing all these promised Daimler Chrysler fuel cell cars with hydrogen. If the idea of extracting CO2 and storing it underground sounds pie in the sky, note that three years ago the Norwegian government of Kjell Magne Bondevik put its insistence on the capture and storage of CO2 at a proposed gas fired power station to a confidence vote and resigned over the issue. As I write, the International Energy Agency has used the Buenos Aires 10th Conference of the Parties on Climate change (COP10), to publish the book Prospects for Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage. Let me know what you think about this (and thanks for all your emails by the way). In a subsequent article I want to introduce you to a pal who thinks governments should divert subsidies from nuclear to putting an IGCC plant at every refinery. * Tim Lloyd Wright has edited refining publications, chaired international downstream meetings and reported for UK newspapers and BBC Radio. | |||||||
Download Energy Industry Resumé with work samples Profile: Tim Lloyd Wright MA Here you'll find a brief profile of my work with international energy, transport and associated environmental issues. Energy trends articles You heard it here first: refinery CO2 storage a reality in Norway From the archive... Over-processed fuel leaves oil tankers adrift | ||||||||
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