Assessing issues of financing a CO2 transportation pipeline infrastructure

For carbon dioxide capture and geologic storage to be deployed commercially and in a widespread manner will require well thought out approaches for transporting the CO2 in a pipeline system from the capture facility to the injection site. Establishing a widespread CO2 transportation infrastructure will require strategic long-term planning, taking into account the potential magnitude of future deployment scenarios for CCS, up to a scale of infrastructure that could be comparable to the scale of oil & gas infrastructure. This paper outlines the results of a study, commissioned by the CO2 Capture Project (CCP) and completed by Environmental Resources Management (ERM) that evaluated the benefits and risks of two approaches to developing CO2 pipeline systems. The two basic approaches are described in the paper as: 1. On a point-to-point basis, which matches a specific source to a specific storage location; or 2. Via the development of pipeline networks, including backbone pipeline systems, which allow for common carriage of CO2 from multiple sources to multiple sinks. An integrated approach to pipeline infrastructure approach offers the lowest average cost on a per ton basis for operators over the life of the projects if sufficient capacity utilization is achieved relatively early in the life of the pipeline. Integrated pipelines also reduce the barriers to entry and are more likely to lead to faster development and deployment of CCS. Without incentives to encourage the development of optimized networks project developers are likely to build point to point pipelines because they offer lower costs for the first movers and do not have the same capacity utilization risk. (C) 2009 Chevron Corporation. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved