Singapore – The Global Centre for Maritime Decarbonisation (GCMD), the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI) and Stena Bulk today initiated the first stage of a two-year, three-phase project to demonstrate shipboard carbon capture at scale.
Together with Alfa Laval, the American Bureau of Shipping, Deltamarin and TNO, the consortium of leading players from the energy and shipping industries will investigate on-board capture and storage, as well as offloading of captured carbon dioxide (CO2) to address the challenges and opportunities of deploying carbon capture technology on ships.
Although a lot of effort is going into the development of low and zero-carbon fuels, that development alone may not be fast enough to allow international shipping to meet IMO’s greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets. Projections indicate that 85% of the fuel mix for two-stroke engines will remain fossil fuel based by 2030 and 34% by 2050 . Shipboard carbon capture can help reduce GHG emissions of current vessels, with the possibility of recycling captured CO2 to produce alternative fuels.
Project REMARCCABLE (Realising Maritime Carbon Capture to demonstrate the Ability to Lower Emissions) is the world’s first project aimed to demonstrate end-to-end shipboard carbon capture at scale.
While carbon capture technologies have been successfully used by OGCI’s member companies to reduce CO2 emissions from power plants and industrial operations, their use in the shipping industry is still in development.
In the largest project of its kind, targeting at least 30% absolute CO2 capture, or approximately 1000 kg/hr of capture, the seven-member consortium will build and test a marine carbon capture system onboard a Stena Bulk medium range (MR) tanker to assess the operational challenges of running such a system on a ship at sea.
Project REMARCCABLE will use non-proprietary equipment and processes, so results can be shared broadly and publicly to maximise learning and encourage further technology development. The project also aims to establish a pathway to reduce the cost of CO2 capture to 150 €/tCO2 or lower to allow the technology to be commercially deployed in future.
Stena Bulk’s participation in the consortium of the seven organisations will help guide the technical design and integration of the system onboard, as well as help evaluate the operational and commercial opportunities and challenges when capturing CO2 at sea.
An MR tanker was chosen for the project as vessels of similar size are estimated to emit 17% of shipping’s total CO2 emissions. The initial demonstration will involve over 500 hours of capture of the exhaust from burning high-sulphur fuel oil (HSFO) or very low sulphur fuel oil (VLSFO) and will include offloading(s) of captured and liquefied CO2 (LCO2) at ports along the route of a 10-day deep-sea voyage. Following a successful test phase, Stena Bulk will retain the carbon capture system onboard and extend its use beyond this pilot.
With an off-taker for the captured CO2 identified, Project REMARCCABLE will cover onboard capture and storage, as well as utilisation and/or sequestration to account for CO2 emissions reduction from ship to shore. This will make it the only pilot demonstrating shipboard carbon capture across the full value chain.
Professor Lynn Loo, CEO of the Global Centre for Maritime Decarbonisation, said: “GCMD views shipboard carbon capture as one of the mid-term solutions needed to help the maritime sector to decarbonise. The open sourcing of Project REMARCCABLE, piloting under real-world conditions and delivering end-to-end solutions, is in line with GCMD’s goals of lowering the barriers for adoption so international shipping can meet or exceed the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) GHG emissions reduction targets for 2030 and 2050.” Photo: Stena Bulk
