World's No 1 miner sees bigger role for carbon-capture systems

BEIJING – BHP Billiton, the world’s biggest mining company, said wider use of systems that trap carbon emissions will be needed to meet international climate goals, even as investments in the technology stall.

“We have knowledge of geology, markets and economics, so there’s probably something we can bring to the table here in terms of our understanding around CCS to try to push this technology down the cost curve so it can be more readily available at scale and affordable costs,” Fiona Wild, a BHP VP for sustainability and climate change, said in an interview.

BHP, which mines metals and coal, started a collaboration in 2016 with Peking University that might lead to a pilot carbon-capture project with a steel company in China, Wild said.

In contrast to power generation, where it’s possible to shift from coal or gas to renewables, industrial activities like steel making and cement manufacturing don’t have good options for lowering emissions, so carbon-capture systems have “a really strong role to play in steel,” she said.

ZERO EMISSIONS
BHP’s plans are part of a larger push by the company to achieve net-zero operational greenhouse gas emissions in the second half of the century. In the nearer term, BHP’s goal is to keep emissions by 2022 at or below 2017 levels.

CCS systems are a key component of BHP’s strategy because they “have the capability to materially reduce global emissions” across many industries, Wild said.

CCS systems separate carbon dioxide from other emissions generated when coal, oil or natural gas is burned. It can then be injected into geological systems underground in a liquefied state.

“People will continue to use fossil fuels for quite a number of decades, and without CCS I don’t know how we will reach climate goals,” Wild said.

CANADA CENTRE

BHP’s partnership with Peking University is aimed at understanding what technical and economic barriers are blocking deployment of carbon-capture systems in the steel sector, and trying to develop policies and a road map to overcome them, she said.

BHP is also cooperating with Canadian energy company SaskPower International Inc. on a carbon-capture knowledge center in Canada to learn from the world’s first commercial-scale plant that burns coal while cutting carbon emissions by 90%. And the company in April started a research project with the University of Melbourne, the University of Cambridge and Stanford University to examine long-term storage of carbon dioxide.

Deploying the technology at the scale needed will require policy and regulatory support, as well as broader societal acceptance, Wild said.

“It’s hard at the moment to make CCS sexy,” she said. “But as time goes on, I think CCS becomes a really important part of the mitigation response to climate change.” 

Comment:  So.....Could this be the answer to the environmental issues associated with the proposed "Ferrochrome Processing Plant" that  Noront plans to build?  Could this be the answer to solving both the Chromium-6, and greenhouse gas emissions dilemma that Mr. Coutts so boldly mentioned in his last media interview?  Perhaps this type of pollution filtration system could be incorporated into Noront's "Ferrochrome Processing Plant" design, with the plant being located somewhere in Ontario with a vast geological network of tunnels and shafts that would be deep enough to reduce any chance of airborne pollution, or contamination of ground water rivers and streams.  If a "Carbon-Capture System" such as the one mentioned in the above article is possible then such pollutants could be liquefied, and then pumped subsurface, into....well.....a deep mine shaft....for argument sake.  Theoretically, a mine shaft such as the one at the soon to be old "Kidd Creek Mine Site" might be just the perfect spot to dispose of these types of liquid rendered pollutants, and remove this toxic greenhouse gas emissions subject right out of the Ferrochrome Processing Plant equation.