This activity pursues research, development and demonstration of technologies to drastically reduce the adverse environmental impact of fossil fuel use aiming at highly efficient and cost effective power and/ or steam generation plants with near zero emissions, based on CO2 capture and storage technologies, in particular underground storage.
The cross-cutting actions between activities energy.5 and energy.6 are based on previous actions initiated under the 5th and 6th framework programmes and take into account results as well as work under way. Their common aim is to enable the arrival of an integrated technological solution allowing for zero emission power generation from fossil fuels.
Priorities have also been determined in accordance with those identified by the work of the Technology Platform for zero emission, with a view to getting to the vision established by the ZEP platform of having integrated solutions for zero emission fossil fuel based power available by 2020. This requires large scale demonstration in place by 2015 at the latest.
The aim and expected impact of the overall activity (shared with activity energy.6: clean coal technologies) are:
- the development of more cost effective zero emission fossil fuel based power plants to enable the use of fossil fuel reserves with a substantially reduced environmental impact
- the development of safer storage, monitoring and verification techniques for geological storage to enable the large scale deployment of zero emission fossil fuel power plants with a wide public acceptance. It would also enable the qualification of such plants into the European Emission Trading Schemes
- the development of clean coal technologies with a view to delivering zero emission to enable the wider use of indigenous solid hydrocarbon (hard coal, lignite, oil shale and other solid fossil fuel) resources, as well as widely abundant traded coal, compatible with the environment.
All these actions would put the European industry in these sectors in a better position for markets in the EU and outside, in a carbon-constrained world.
There are two areas identified within this activity:
- CO2 capture: projects in this area should optimise and develop capture techniques for both greenfield and retrofit power generation applications. The expected impact is to decrease the cost of capture down to about 15 per ton of CO2 to allow zero emission fossil fuel plants to better compete with other zero emission technologies.
- CO2 storage: projects should address the safety of geological CO2 storage at all timescales, the liability issues for different kinds of CO2 storage underground, e.g. saline aquifers, depleted oil or gas fields, enhanced oil or gas recovery, enhanced coal bed methane. It is expected that this will give full confidence in geological CO2 storage and will form the basis for the legal and regulatory requirements allowing the deployment of large scale near zero emission power generation technology using underground CO2 storage.
Cross cutting issues include areas related to “CO2 capture and storage for zero emission power generation” and “clean coal technologies” such as power generation technologies for integrated zero emission solutions and cross cutting and regulatory issues.
