New vessels and new cargo: CO2 transportation from Northern Europe to Iceland

We would like to share this article, written by Pablo Rodas-Martini

It will be an extraordinary voyage. It will resemble the old sagas of the first Vikings, Naddodd and Garear Svavarsson, who traveled to Iceland in the late IX century. The former discovered it; the latter circumnavigated and realized it was an island. It will again be a voyage from northern Europe, probably Denmark, to Straumsvík, not far from Iceland's capital, Reykjavik: 1,500 nautical miles and five or six days at sea. The journey will be unique because it will be the first time in history that such a special cargo will be transported from the continent to a place as far as Iceland to be buried there.

It will be like transporting a dangerous prisoner who has been captured and will be jailed for millennia deep underground in a prison made of stone. The prisoner's name is CO2, and before it escapes from industrial processes to the atmosphere, it will be captured, liquefied and stored in special tanks inside a ship, and sent a long way up to Iceland, where it will be jailed (stored) under rocks that will trap and mineralized it in a few years. From gas to liquid and then solid. CO2 will be buried for thousands and thousands of years as rocks.

The idea came from two sides. First, on the continental side, two Danish shipping companies, Evergas and Ultragas, both specializing in transporting liquid gasses, decided to create Dan Unity CO2, a company focused entirely on the transportation of CO2 either for storage (CCS) or reuse (CCU). Second, on the Icelandic side, the project Carbfix, which has won many awards and has been profiled by the BBC, The Economist, Bloomberg and many other mainstream media and in films, has developed innovative technologies for what is considered some of the fastest and most secure ways to store CO2. The Vikings' descendants are showing the world that CCSU is feasible and commercially viable.?

For short distances, there is no debate that pipelines are the cheapest way to transport CO2 from capture to storage sites. However, for long distances (1,500 nautical miles is a long distance), and mainly if they are not over land, transportation by ship is best. That is why the creation of Dan Unity CO2 was critical, and they invited TGE Marine to participate in this shipping adventure: The German company will design the vessels, and the Danish one will own those assets. TGE Marine has designed vessels in the past for Evergas and Ultragas, and it will do it this time for Dan Unity CO2. Below is the design of the 12,500m3 (three other designs are for 7,500m3, 22,000m3, and 50,000m3).

But why Iceland? Why do ships from Northern Europe need to sail so far away to store CO2? As Carbfix reminds us, trees and vegetation are not the only means to store carbon; vast quantities of it, probably more than in trees and vegetation, are stored in rocks, and rocks don't release the CO2 if a wildfire takes place. The technologies developed and patented by Carbfix, as startling as they may sound, replicate and accelerate the conversion process into stone. The liquefied CO2 that the ships will transport will be dissolved in water, becoming a kind of sparkling water, and injected into the subsurface, which starts about 50m below the earth's surface and can extend up to 2.8km below. The most surprising part of Carbfix technology is that solid carbonate minerals could occur in barely two years. Yes, you read well, and I quote from its website: "at least 95% of the injected CO2 mineralizes within two years."

In other words, blending water and CO2 into the favorable type of rock could speed a process that otherwise would require hundreds of years into only a few. The carbonated water will react with rock underground and release calcium, magnesium and iron, elements that, once combined with the dissolved CO2, will fill up with carbonates in the empty spaces within the rock. The carbonates will be stable underground for thousands of years, unlike most carbon storage systems in which gaseous CO2 could leak into the atmosphere after some years. And that particular type of rock is the young basaltic rock, and I quote again: "Young basaltic rocks are highly fractured and porous such that water seeps easily through the interconnected cracks and empty spaces underground." Of course, now you can easily guess that Iceland, located in the Ring of Fire, has plenty of those young basaltic rocks! A final quote: "It has been estimated that the active rift zone in Iceland could store over 400 Gt CO2 (400 billion tonnes CO2)."

And there are two final pieces of the puzzle. First, the import and storage of CO2 in Iceland is legal and supported by the national authorities. Second, Carbfix has already stored more than 70,000 tons of CO2 at its injection site in Hellisheiei, Iceland.

Information that Dan Unity CO2 has released about the transportation of the CO2 to Iceland indicates that he first vessels will be built to transport around 12-20 thousand tons of CO2 in liquid form.?The ships will arrive at the Coda Terminal, a purpose-built terminal to handle CO2. It will be the first of its kind in the world where the CO2 captured from industrial sites in Northern Europe will be unloaded into onshore tanks for temporary storage. Once there, the CO2 will be pumped with seawater into a network of injection wells into young basaltic bedrocks. The water will be sourced from the same reservoir where the injection occurs, procuring maximum circulation and reuse. The expected storage capacity of the terminal will be around three million tonnes of CO2 per year by 2030.

Since the first vessels are expected to start sailing to Iceland by 2025, they will be powered with LNG (carbon neutral fuels are not yet ready for deep-sea shipping), but it has been estimated that the carbon footprint from the shipping will be only about 3-6% of the CO2 that will be transported and stored.

I started with a Norse saga; let's close with an ancient Greek myth. The capture and storage of CO2 will resemble the famous myth in which the Olympian gods, led by Zeus and his two brothers, Poseidon and Hades, defeated their father Chronus and the Titans and imprisoned them well below mother earth, in a cavity below the deepest of all abysses, Tartarus.

*Pablo Rodas-Martini is a Contributor to TGE Marine. He has a Ph.D. and M.Sc. from Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London.

[And I will insert this video from Carbfix]

https://www.carbfix.com/codaterminal

https://carbfix.cdn.prismic.io/carbfix/d0416445-43f2-4b38-bbbb-c6f4b099b482_Carbfix-CODA-loop-5.mp4