The next step is transportation of the carbon dioxide to a suitable location for storage.

1. Pipeline Transport

Where the gas can be stored relatively close to the power station, pipelines are the most obvious way to transport the gas to the storage site.

In actual fact, large-scale transportation of carbon dioxide in pipelines has been going on for over 30 years in the United States, where the gas is used to recover oil from nearly depleted fields.
And in our back yard in the North Sea, the Snøhvit project came on stream in 2007. This scheme transports approximately 700,000 tonnes of CO2 a year a distance of 145km from an LNG facility to the Snøhvit oil and gas field.

2. Ship Transport

The shipping of carbon dioxide would be very similar to shipping liquefied petroleum gases (LPG), which already happens around the world. The properties of liquefied CO2 are similar to those of LPG, and the technology could be scaled up to large CO2 carriers if required.

In order to liquefy CO2, it is necessary to both cool and pressurise the CO2, typically to around -50ºC and 7 bar. However, the carbon dioxide would have to be temporarily stored onshore until such time as a boat came available, when it would be transferred to the ship’s tanks. Once on site, the CO2 would be offloaded and heated to allow injection into the storage site.