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The World Cement Podcast welcomes Dr Katherine Romanak of the University of Texas at Austin for a deep dive into the topic of geological CO2 storage – the processes involved both above and below ground, the challenges and opportunities, and what (not) to worry about!
Topics covered include:
Topics covered include:
- Dispelling misconceptions and exploring the importance of public buy-in
- The chemical processes involved and what actually happens underground
- What are the risks?
- Risks vs rewards
As always, make sure to rate, review and subscribe to the World Cement Podcast if you haven’t already done so!
Creators and Guests
Host
What is World Cement Podcast?
The World Cement podcast: a podcast series for professionals in the cement industry.
Hello everyone, and welcome back to the World Cement Podcast with me, your host, David Bisley, Senior Editor of World Cement. In this episode, I'm delighted to be joined by Doctor. Katherine Romanak, Research Professor in the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin. And today we're going to be delving into the S part of CCS, namely storage. We're going to take a look at the challenges, both practical and political, as well as exactly what happens to the CO2 once it's underground.
David Bizley:Registration is now open for World Cement's decarbonization focused conference, EnviroTech. Taking place in London on the March next year, EnviroTech is the cement industry's leading decarbonization conference. Featuring an agenda packed with leaders and technical experts working at the cutting edge of the cement industry's decarbonization efforts, multiple networking events, a full exhibition, and a luxury venue in the heart of one of the world's great cities, EnviroTek is not to be missed. Head over to worldcement.com/envirotek to register today and join your peers at the heart of the decarbonization discussion. I hope to see you there.
David Bizley:Katherine, welcome to the World Cement Podcast. It's lovely to have you with us today.
Dr Katherine Romanak:Thank you, David.
David Bizley:As always, we like to begin with a proper introduction. So, Katherine, please tell us a bit about yourself and the work that you do.
Dr Katherine Romanak:Sure. So I am a geologist. More specifically, I am an environmental geochemist. And for the past eighteen years, I have been working at the Gulf Coast Carbon Center at the Bureau of Economic Geology in carbon capture and storage. And what I work in is the storage part of that technology.
Dr Katherine Romanak:And so what I've been doing is trying to understand how the CO2 stays in the ground and how it may impact the environment if it leaks. And I've also been developing monitoring technologies, able to track the CO2 to make sure that it stays where we put it.
David Bizley:Okay, excellent. Thank you. Now, before we get into some of the practical challenges facing the rollout of CCS, There's also another barrier that this technology tends to face in the form of skepticism from the public who might not quite understand why it's still vital for industries like cement. What are some of the most common misconceptions that you've encountered when it comes to CCS And where do you think these tend to stem from?
Dr Katherine Romanak:Yeah, I think this is really important because I think there's two places where these misperceptions stem from. And the first one is so understandable, it's the technical issues. CCS is a very technical activity, and it's difficult for people to understand, right? If you're not used to understanding geological scales, then it can be very hard to understand how you get CO2 deep in a rock. And so I think really helping people understand the technical aspects of CCS is really important.
Dr Katherine Romanak:But there's another one, too, and I call it a socio emotional issue. And it's just that people tend to be very frightened of it. They don't understand it, so they're frightened. And they seem to have kind of what I look at as almost a Hollywood mentality of risk, like feeling that if something went wrong, it would be a disaster, which we know now isn't really true. Then the other is just a lack of trust in industry overall.
Dr Katherine Romanak:I think some people have been, you know, they've they've not had good experiences with industry that's moved in near where they live. And so there's also a lack of trust. So so there's really a lot of work to be done to help people understand this technology.
David Bizley:Okay. So how can the cement industry and others dispel some of the misinformation, engage with the public, and begin to separate fact from fiction? And have you seen any effective examples of this kind of community engagement?
Dr Katherine Romanak:Another important question, David. And I think it just goes to basically listening to people,
David Bizley:helping
Dr Katherine Romanak:them understand, understanding what's important to them and why they may feel the way they do. A lot of it is education. I actually did a study where we did a survey to try to understand the answer to this question as deeply as we could, and one of the interesting things that we found out is that there seems to be two generally different types of people. There's one type of person that likes science, likes to consume science media, likes to try to understand science, and is interested in it. And then there's another group of people that not so much.
Dr Katherine Romanak:They're not as interested in science, and they might not feel as self confident with scientific subjects. And so what we've found is that for the people that maybe have a harder time understanding science, what they tend to go to for their information is people in their community that they trust. So one of the things that we've been able to do is to talk to the leaders in communities that actually do have an ability and a want to understand science, and then let them take that message and that information to their communities. And we've found that to be a very good way of outreach and helping people understand better.
David Bizley:Okay, excellent. It's interesting how the social aspect of things is almost as important as the technology side of things.
Dr Katherine Romanak:Yes, it really, really is. Absolutely.
David Bizley:So moving then to that practical technology side of things, it is widely agreed that CCS is going to be essential if the cement industry in its current form is going to decarbonize. And there are other hard to abate industries that are also aiming to take advantage of CO2 storage as a solution for them. And that of course means demand for this solution is only going to grow. Is there enough capacity to meet demand for all of these industries looking to store their CO2?
Dr Katherine Romanak:Yeah, now that's an interesting question and it's very timely actually because there was a recent paper that was published in the journal Nature that was basically saying that we had to be careful, that there wasn't enough storage for all the carbon dioxide that we need to store. And it was very interesting because a lot of things in that article were just technically not correct.
David Bizley:Oh, okay.
Dr Katherine Romanak:Yeah. There there were some things about depth limit. I think some saying 2,500 feet was that we couldn't go any deeper than that, but we do have Yeah, we already do have projects operating deeper than that.
David Bizley:Wow.
Dr Katherine Romanak:So things like that were a little bit off, but I think one of the main parts about that article that was, I don't know, really interesting to me was that they said, we only have 1,400 gigatons worth of space, and that that was down from very large estimates that were orders of magnitude higher. Yeah. But in fact, actually, the IPCC has always said that around a thousand gigatons of storage is all that we need. So if if they're saying 1,400 gigatons of space, then that's actually an upscale from what the IPCC says. Right.
Dr Katherine Romanak:Yeah. So obviously, we wanna manage this resource as best we can.
David Bizley:Yeah.
Dr Katherine Romanak:But I do think that's not a problem. Most of our estimates are telling us very squarely that we do have enough space for all the emissions that we need to store.
David Bizley:Okay, excellent. It's interesting to see how there's been that disagreement, effectively.
Dr Katherine Romanak:Yeah, yes. And you can see it right now online. You can see the arguments that are coming up pro and against that paper and what was said in that paper. Fascinating.
David Bizley:Yeah. On this sort of similar topic, in a previous article that you wrote for World Cement, you mentioned that on this note, we've already stored something like 200,000,000 tons of CO2 underground across various different projects. So sticking with the practical side of things, how exactly does the storage process work? Is it just a case of finding the right geology and pumping it into the ground?
Dr Katherine Romanak:Well, no, there's quite a lot more to it than that.
David Bizley:I thought so.
Dr Katherine Romanak:But yeah. However, you're right. The geology, of course, is is the main condition that we care about, which is, you know, we have to be able we need enough space for whatever we're trying to decarbonize. We need to make sure that the CO2 will go in and that we'll stay there. So that's the geology side.
Dr Katherine Romanak:But there's also the transport side as well. Wherever the facility is that we're trying to de carbonize, we're going to have to transport that CO2 to the suitable storage site. And so that's another thing because transport is also a cost, and of course, want to keep costs low. So there's a lot to it. We're thinking about when we capture the CO2 from an industrial flue stack of any kind, there may be some impurities that come into the stream.
Dr Katherine Romanak:What types of impurities or other trace gases can we allow in that stream? We're thinking about that a lot. And we're also thinking about the risk and how we manage any risk. And so all of these things are going into these decisions. There's a lot of decisions to be made as CCS grows and more industries want to decarbonize.
Dr Katherine Romanak:We're also thinking, especially in The United States where CCS has really taken off and there's many projects coming in, that we want to make sure also that these projects don't interact with each other in the subsurface. There really is a lot of considerations, and the project developers are really taking this very seriously, making sure that the whole project, from the capture to the transport to the storage is done safely and responsibly.
David Bizley:Excellent. And following on the chain then, what exactly happens to the gas once it's underground? What kind of chemical processes are going on?
Dr Katherine Romanak:Right, so first of all, interesting enough, it's not a gas when it's injected. So when we strip the gas out of the flue stack, we then compress it into a liquid. Right. And this is this is one of the considerations that we have because in general, 800 meters deep is the place where that CO2 will remain as a liquid. So we pump the CO2 liquid at least 800 meters deep, where it actually enters the pore space in between the grains of the rock.
Dr Katherine Romanak:There's a lot of misunderstanding about how this works, so I'm glad you're asking me this because I think it's really important for people to understand it's extremely deep and the CO2 goes in between the grains of the rocks. There, it becomes residually trapped in the little spaces. And I'll tell you why. The CO2 is actually what we call the non wetting phase. And what this means is that there's already salty water residing in the pores of those rocks.
Dr Katherine Romanak:And so when the CO2 comes in, it pushes that salty water aside, it invades the pore, and then more salty water comes in behind it. It encapsulates the drop of CO2 in a blanket of water, where it then dissolves, so then it becomes dissolved, and then eventually over time it will become a mineral. So there's many different mechanisms within the subsurface that is trapping that CO2, and it happens almost immediately.
David Bizley:Okay, excellent. Now some of the concerns raised regarding underground storage, and we touched on this a little bit earlier, are reminiscent of those that come up whenever something like fracking is mentioned. Things like contamination of groundwater. What kind of research has been done into analyzing these risks? Is there something we need to be worried about?
Dr Katherine Romanak:Another great question, David. So first of all, it's really important to understand that fracking is very different than CO2 storage. So in fracking, what we try to do is just create small cracks in the rocks that will then release the gas that we can then produce. And CCS is actually the total opposite of that. So we're trying to keep the gas in the ground, and so what we do is the regulations actually require that you stay beneath the pressures that would frack the rock.
Dr Katherine Romanak:So we need to operate at much lower pressures. But the question of groundwater contamination is really important, and what I would love people to understand is that we had those exact same questions about twenty five years ago when we started studying CO2 storage, and this has been one of my main focuses as well, is to understand this. Of course, carbon dioxide in your water is not a problem. We drink fizzy water all the time, all right? So CO2 is not a problem.
Dr Katherine Romanak:It's fine. But what we were concerned about was that if CO2 got into a drinking water aquifer, the pH would lower, you would get carbonic acid forming, and then that carbonic acid could either dissolve minerals and release some trace metals, or could actually take trace metals that are kind of attached to the grain surface and mobilize those metals into the drinking water. And so we put every single scientific approach that we had to try to understand this question. So one of the things we would do is we would bubble CO2 in the laboratory, We would bubble CO2 into beakers that held the rocks and the water from various aquifers, and then we would look to see what metals were released. We would also do this in the field.
Dr Katherine Romanak:We would use shallow controlled releases, where we would actually inject CO2 very shallow in order to make it leak so that we could then study it. And then also, we can look at natural analogs because there are many places in the world where CO2 naturally resides in the subsurface. So we've looked, taken every angle at it, and what we found is that, yes, indeed, sometimes some small, very small amounts of metals can be released into the groundwater, but they never took the drinking water quality above the standards. They never made the drinking water unsafe to drink.
David Bizley:Right, okay.
Dr Katherine Romanak:And as fast as these metals would actually drop in, they would drop out as quickly as they dropped in. So it's a very transient impact, very small, and it self remediates itself. So now we feel so much better about drinking water that we're not as concerned about it, but we still do monitor drinking water as part of the regulation.
David Bizley:Hopefully all of that combined will reassure people that there's nothing to worry about.
Dr Katherine Romanak:I hope it will because the other thing about that, David, is just that we have stored over 200,000,000 tons. We've not had one example of CO2 being released from a storage site. In fact, we find it to be so sticky in the subsurface that our models can really barely make a CO2 leak impact groundwater significantly.
David Bizley:Right.
Dr Katherine Romanak:So so really, there's many different sides to this that make us feel better about it.
David Bizley:Okay. Excellent stuff. One of the other interesting things you mentioned in the article you wrote for World Cement was that despite it being this relatively benign friendly molecule, we need to begin thinking of CO2 as a waste product and CCS as a waste management process. Why would that change in approach be helpful?
Dr Katherine Romanak:Well, I think that first of all, hear a lot of people comparing CCS to wind and solar and other types of renewable energies. And I find that odd because CCS is not an energy production technology. It's a waste reduction technology. So just like I pay to have a trash truck come to my house and take my trash away, I think we need to be thinking more about this as waste disposal because we can't continue to dump our carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I mean, we know that with trash, found out what the outcomes of that was, right?
Dr Katherine Romanak:We really need to be doing this with carbon dioxide. That's why I think it's useful also because there's a lot of people that are concerned about the cost of it. But when you think about what the cost is of losing your biosphere, which is what is happening right now with climate change, I think it's useful to think of it in that way sometimes. That it's not producing energy, it's actually disposing of waste. That waste comes from all different types of industries, not just energy, even though it is 75% of our emissions are coming from energy production.
David Bizley:Right. And on the sort of topic of, I think you touched on it, the relatively high cost of CCS input and support from policymakers is going to be key to enabling the widespread rollout of this technology, especially while costs remain relatively high as they are. Are there any specific steps that you'd like to see policymakers take in order to promote CCS?
Dr Katherine Romanak:You're absolutely right about that. We need policy, and we need strong policy. We saw in The US with the Biden administration, we saw that policy actually take root.
David Bizley:Okay.
Dr Katherine Romanak:And we need a price on carbon. We need policy that says you can't. It's similar to anything where there's waste involved. We have to make sure that there's a price on carbon, that you're not allowed, industries aren't allowed to actually just dump their carbon into the atmosphere, and there's one policy idea that I find very interesting, and it's called a carbon take back obligation. This is a policy idea really where fossil fuel producers or any industry that is emitting CO2 is legally required to ensure that a certain share of that CO2 that's being released by their projects is permanently captured and stored.
Dr Katherine Romanak:And so it works kind of like an extended producer responsibility, kind of like companies that take back their packaging waste, or things like that. I think things like that, we really need strong policy.
David Bizley:Okay. Yeah. I like that kind of idea. Thus, I think in some places, restaurants like McDonald's have agreements with local councils about doing collecting their own rubbish back.
Dr Katherine Romanak:Exactly.
David Bizley:Catherine, before we wrap things up for this episode then, I'd like to leave our audience with our guests' final thoughts on the topic we've discussed. So do you have any final thoughts to share with our audience?
Dr Katherine Romanak:Yeah, I do think that it's so important for people to support policy. I'm very happy, and it's really lovely, when people want to do their individual actions, like reducing their carbon footprint is really important. But I think that right now, what people do not understand is the scale and the urgency of this problem. During COVID, when the whole world shut down and we weren't really emitting much carbon, is when we started to get the amount of CO2 that we needed to mitigate under that scenario, right? And so individual actions are not enough.
Dr Katherine Romanak:This is a climate emergency, and we have a long way to go, and so we really have to be like, it's urgent. We need to get these policies in place, We need to get CCS projects going. And on every other front of the carbon mitigation portfolio, we need to scale it up immediately. So it's urgent, and we need we need action now.
David Bizley:Okay. Katherine, that's all for this episode of the World Cement Podcast. Thank you for joining us and going through this super important topic with us.
Dr Katherine Romanak:Thank you, David.
David Bizley:Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the World Cement Podcast. And if you did like this episode, please do make sure to rate, review, and subscribe if you haven't already done so. And why not also take a few moments to check out our back catalog of episodes as well, to access more insightful interviews with cement industry experts talking about a variety of topics. Goodbye for now. Registration is now open for World Cement's decarbonization focused conference, EnviroTek.
David Bizley:Taking place in London on the fifteenth to March 18 next year, EnviroTech is the cement industry's leading decarbonization conference. Featuring an agenda packed with leaders and technical experts working at the cutting edge of the cement industry's decarbonization efforts, multiple networking events, a full exhibition, and a luxury venue in the heart of one of the world's great cities, EnviroTek is not to be missed. Head over to worldcement.com/envirotech to register today and join your peers at the heart of the decarbonization discussion. I hope to see you there.