The Chemical Business Association of Tarragona (AEQT) is committed to turning the regions of southern Catalonia into a CO2 ‘hub’.
“We want the decarbonization center to be in Tarragona,” explained the president of the AEQT, Ignasi Cañagueral.
The companies plan to create geological CO2 stores to decarbonize the industry in the Ebro basin also under the sea.
Along these lines, ‘El Economista’ announced this Monday that Repsol wants to carry out the first project of these characteristics in the State off the coast of Tarragona.
Despite the failure of the Castor project, the companies defend that this technology is safe and is used successfully in various places around the world.
The AEQT proposes decarbonization as a key element in the fight against climate change.
“Spain, Catalonia and the territory must understand that we must remove CO2 from the atmosphere” and at the same time “CO2 can be a raw material in the future,” said Cañagueral.
“Today it is very difficult to do things with CO2 because it requires a lot of energy and is very expensive,” but in a few years “they will be done,” he noted.
The president of the entity stressed that the country needs to eliminate this gas from the atmosphere, investigate and store it and recalled that countries such as Denmark, Norway, the United States and Canada have already begun to do so.
“It is a melon that we must open in the territory,” he said. He also announced that the association is already working with cement companies, energy recovery plants and chemical industry companies in Camp de Tarragona to make the region “the CO2 hub of Catalonia.”
“The cement companies will capture it, they will send it to Tarragona in compression units and then we must decide where it goes. We can load it on a ship and send it to Norway or we can find a geological structure near where it is,” he detailed.
In his opinion, storing gas here would allow the region to gain competitiveness.
“We must create a corridor of CO2 pipelines, just as we have for natural gas or what we will do for hydrogen. With the Port of Tarragona we are talking about the arrival of CO2 capture centers from the Alcanar cement plants. If there are some company that can use it -gas-, it will surely be in Tarragona”, he commented. An example could be synthetic fuels, which Repsol is already working on. However, to make the entire project possible, he has said public help will be necessary.
The president of the business entity recognized that the Castor project fiasco “is not a good starting point”, but defended that it is necessary to “educate citizens”, while highlighting that “the geological storage of gases is a technology , proven, safe and that has worked for many years. “We think it is not possible, when it is. Spain has natural gas storage in three places and it is being done in a sustained manner and does not generate earthquakes,” he explained.
Cañagueral made these statements within the framework of the AEQT annual conference that was held in the Port of Tarragona last Friday. More than 300 people representing institutions and private entities in the territory participated in the meeting and included a presentation by Paula Fernández-Cantelli, leader of the IGME-CSIC geological storage group.
“Tarragona is an industrial area with a significant level of emissions but they do not depend on fuels but are produced in the production process itself,” he explained. In his opinion, the south of the country “is an ideal area” to store CO2, both due to the emissions generated and the “storage potential.”
The scientist has assured that there are studies from the Geological and Mining Institute that highlight that there are places “on land and at sea” with the appropriate characteristics. Specifically, they are basins with sedimentary rocks “that have a lot of porosity and permeability.” In the case of Tarragona, the Ebro basin.
Fernández-Cantelli has specified that they are geological structures generally located between one and three kilometers deep. “The warehouse is a rock. The gas is stored in the pores of the rock. It’s not that there is a hole in the subsoil like a giant swimming pool, but if you look at the rock under the microscope it has pores, and those are the warehouses. It is a sum of micro warehouses,” he said. For the rocky area to be valid for this type of infrastructure, it must have a certain shape and, in turn, on top of it, “an impermeable layer” that prevents the gas from “reaching the surface.”
The CSIC member has asserted that “the storage is permanent” although “that does not mean that the gas could not be recovered in the future.”
Finally, he has highlighted his safety. “If one of the conditions suggests that it is not safe, such as there being no impermeable rock on the surface, that there is a fault nearby or that there may be induced seismicity at unacceptable levels, then it is discarded,” he said.
