Demonstration plant in Mongstad

In February 2009 Vattenfall decided to leave the project in favour to other ongoing and planned Postcombustion projects.

The history about the project

September 2007

Vattenfall was committed to the formation of “European CO2 Test Centre Mongstad”, a strong industrial partnership for designing Postcombustion CO2 capture in Norway. The agreement was signed in June 2007 with the Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum and Energy and initiated the development of the world´s largest CO2 capture facility with subsequent compression and storage.

The center is located at Norway´s largest refinery in coastal Mongstad north of Bergen. By 2010, a new gas-fired combined heat and power plant (CHP) will be constructed here, and full CO₂ capture will be installed by 2014. The plant will produce 280 MW of electricity, 350 MW of heat and 1.8 million tonnes of CO₂ per year (Mt/a). Since the electricity will partly be used to decrease the burning of fossil fuels in the refinery, 0.35 Mt/a CO₂ emissions will be avoided as soon as the plant comes into operation. An additional 1.1 Mt/a will be captured by flue gas CO₂ absorption. To achieve this at an acceptable level of technical and financial risk, phase one will first comprise the creation of a technology partnership and a smaller-scale 100,000 t/a CO₂ absorption plant that is to go into operation in 2010.

This is what the Mongstad majority owner Statoil and the Norwegian ministry had agreed on when this unique joint project was announced in October 2006. Four more international energy companies have joined the partnership for the planning and financing of phase one. In addition to Statoil, these are well-known drivers with acknowledged competence in CCS and process technology, namely Vattenfall, Shell, Hydro and Dong Energy. All six partners will contribute about € 2.4 million for this first planning phase.

At both ends – flue gas source and capture technology – the scope of the project is growing:
In addition to the CHP flue gas, it has been decided to take in the off-gas from the onsite residual catalytic cracker (RCC) as a CO₂ source. This opened up another international dimension for this test centre, since RCC off-gas, as it were, a “carbon copy” of power plant flue gases from coal combustion.

Regarding capture, two absorption systems are now being planned in parallel. One system is based on amine solvents, while the other is based on chilled ammonia.