CO₂ Logistics by Ship II (CO₂LOS)

Background and project purpose?
CCS/CCU transport has up to now been based on pipelines. Transport of CO₂ by ship represents an alternative when pipelines are too expensive due to distance, volume, and depreciation period. Food grade CO₂ has been transported with ships for decades, but these volumes are rather small compared to the planned CCS projects.
This project will investigate different CO₂ ship transport solutions, including the pretreatment needed, terminals, ship transport and loading. Both open sea options and river boat transport was investigated, cost optimize solutions is to be investigated.

What was the project objective?
The scope of the project is to reduce the cost of CO₂ ship transportation by utilizing new technology and investigate optimization possibilities in the logistic chain.

What has the project done in terms of activities?
The project was divided in 13 different work packages. Each of them produced a final report where methods and results were presented. A final report including al the results is available for free, and can be downloaded at www.sintef.no/co2los

An overview of the work packages is given below:
WP1 CO₂ Conditions and Design Basis
WP2 Ship Technology
WP3 Logistics, Terminal and Port Technology
WP4 Offshore unloading
WP5 Logistics GHG impact
WP6 Low pressure design
WP7 CO₂ capture on board
WP8 Ship Tanks beyond prescriptive Class Rules
WP9 Multipurpose use of ships
WP10 Offshore unloading
WP11 Floating liquefaction facility
WP12 Carbon Limits database
WP13 Benchmarking Northern Lights

What has the project achieved? Did the project achieve its objective?
The project has developed a toolbox which future CCS projects can use in early stages when studying transport solutions. The results are summarized in a public final report.

The technical solutions will have to be adjusted when a firm CCS project is developed with decisions on volumes, export and import site, transport pressure, location, and characteristics of the reservoir, etc. Acknowledging this, the methodology used for development of the solutions, including logistics, simulations, calculations, analysis, results from discussion with partners and vendors and literature studies are made an important part of the toolbox.

The project experienced that it is impossible to find an optimal solution that will suit all logistic cases, each solution should be specially adapted to the challenges that are case-specific. The project had good overview of which parameters that affected the costs and the emission from the transport, and how to deal with the consequences of changing these parameters. CO₂LOS II thoroughly investigated the low pressure option, and found no “showstoppers” that a low pressure solution will be possible in a CCS chain. We want to look further at large CO₂ carriers as we found that this will most likely be relevant when CCS is used in a larger scale. An important lesson in the project is the challenges associated with offshore unloading, and especially in such a weather-harsh area as the North Sea.

Future plans?
The next phase of the project, CO₂LOS III, has received funding from CLIMIT and will be executed 2021-222 with almost the same consortium.