Public wary of carbon capture

The new store at the Barendrecht shopping centre looks much like the neighbouring clothing shops and fast food chains, but it is much more exotic.

Like a real estate sales office, its walls feature colourful posters with diagrams of the local geology and reassuring conclusions from environmental assessments.

Since April, the Dutch government and energy group Shell set up an information centre at the mall to sell to a sceptical public a promising but untested new environmental technology: carbon capture and storage.

 

CCS, as it is known, involves capturing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, factories and other installations and burying them deep underground where they cannot rise into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming.

But the technology, which could account for a fifth of all emissions reductions from power plants and industry by 2050, has not yet been tested on a grand scale.

Before its backers can launch it across Europe, they must overcome public concerns about its safety.

Nowhere is that challenge more apparent than in Barendrecht, a leafy and densely-packed town of 45,000 that has become a public testing ground for CCS.

Almost 2km below the shopping centre lies a nearly spent natural gas reservoir that Shell and the Dutch government were planning to pump full of carbon dioxide from a nearby refinery to test the technology.

So far, though, CCS has proved to be a tough sell. "It's become clear that there is no public acceptance for carbon capture and storage in the boundaries of this community," said Simon Zuurbier, the town alderman who has emerged as a leading opponent of the technology.

Barendrecht residents cite concerns, from the dangers of living and working above tonnes of noxious gas to more banal worries about property prices. They have managed to delay Shell's plans.

They are braced for a tougher fight as the federal government prepares a final ruling on the project before the year-end.

The Netherlands is not the only place where CCS is meeting opposition. Last month, Berlin was forced to postpone a law that would govern carbon storage after complaints from the governments of regions where many of the sites would be located.

Those sorts of delays are raising alarm in the industry that CCS could become mired in a political and regulatory thicket before it can ever be deployed.

"The greatest challenge facing CCS is not so much technical as it is one of perception," said Eric Drosin of Zero Emissions Platform, a CCS advocacy group that includes energy companies like Shell as well as some environmental groups.

"The technology is virtually unknown among the general public."The Netherlands would seem to be an ideal place to introduce CCS.

It is renowned for its progressive environmental policies and also features a warren of ageing gas fields to swallow the carbon spewed out by its large industrial base.

Two of those are in Barendrecht, just 18km away from Shell's Pernis refinery, which produces about 1m tonnes of carbon-dioxide a year.

Currently, about half of that is shipped to soda factories and greenhouses while the rest floats away.

For the Dutch government, the project represented its first onshore attempt to store carbon, and a necessary step before undertaking the much larger CCS projects it is planning for 2015.

As such, it has agreed to contribute up to €29.75m ($41.75m, £25.5m) to Shell to support the project.

But almost immediately, the company bungled the public relations. In late 2007, Mr Zuurbier and other town leaders were irritated to learn of the project from the company and not the Dutch government.

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Source: Financial Times