Shipping companies, pipeline operators and students have quietly started studying the risks and money to be made in moving carbon-dioxide gas and liquid from carbon-capture projects to still-imaginary storage and trading hubs.

In Norway, studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology have focused on making carbon one of the cargoes carried by liquefied petroleum gas carriers. Dedicated, but pricier and larger cargo carriers of 46,000 tons are also on the drawing board, and the tech-savvy students have already animated the ships's voyage from a jetty at Norway’s carbon test bed Mongstad.

“Amonia or LPG could be a return cargo,” one of the engineering students told an audience of international carbon experts in Oslo. He said 46 million tons a year could then be sent to storage.

The students said their studies paralleled a McKinsey study commissioned by Canada-based shipping giant Teekay. In Teekay’s study, US$19 per ton of ship-borne carbon dioxide gas might be the freight rate by 2015, when the world carbon price is expected to reach $65 per ton.

But pipeline operators, too, hope to organize to move carbon-dioxide gas from CCS projects. Though pipelines are seen being part of a CCS project’s financing, they have the advantage of having piped carbon-dioxide into increased-oil-recover projects for the past 30 years.

“The safety record of carbon-dioxide pipelines is better than the safety record of oil and gas pipelines,” said Ian Wright, PB project manager at the oil company’s CCS project at In Selah in Algeria.

Challenged by a delegate at Oslo’s CCS conference, Wright said he was citing IEA numbers.

A Shell delegate then asked, “To what standard should we develop these pipelines.” He said Shell had carbon pipeline projects under planning in developing countries.

Norwegian pipeline operator Gassco said it’s ready and willing to be a carbon dioxide mover.

“We see it as part of our core business,” Gassco spokesperson Kjell Varlo Larsen told Scandoil.com.

“We’re doing a study in two parts, and one part is a transport study,” Larsen said.

While pipeline operators concern themselves with the corrosive effects of carbon-dioxide on pipelines, one expert delegate said it was really the contaminants in the gas, and not the gas itself, which could degrade pipe material.

The NTNU students, meanwhile, also say the ships can be fueled by liquefied natural gas, or LNG, and be “zero-emissions”. “The technology is available today,” they said.

Tags: Aker Clean Carbon, CCS