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Rio Grande LNG seeks FERC's consent to increase carbon capture in the project
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Indicates that it plans to reduce emissions by at least 90% from the previous proposal
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NextDecade LNG has made limited modifications to the federal authorization of the Rio Grande LNG terminal, allowing it to voluntarily capture and store the carbon dioxide produced at the terminal.
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Rio Grande stated in the application (CP22-17) filed on November 17 that this change should allow the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to "swiftly discover that the RGLNG terminal does not contribute to global climate change while the CCS system is operating. It will be huge".
When the proposal was made, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that FERC had problems with the original authorization of the Brownsville, Texas project, and sent FERC's order back to the committee, but it did not revoke it.
The court’s August 3 ruling found that FERC failed to fully assess the impact of the project’s greenhouse gas emissions because the committee ignored the argument that the social cost of carbon or some other generally accepted method must be used to assess the impact. The team also found flaws in FERC's environmental justice analysis of the project.
In its new, limited application, Rio Grande LNG stated that the deployment of the CCS system at the terminal will enable Rio Grande LNG to capture and store at least 90% of the carbon dioxide emissions that will be emitted during the previously approved commercial operation of the terminal -Remove carbon dioxide from feed gas and tail gas.
It asserts that, based on the level of 2019, the deployment of CCS may result in a 0.0001% increase in CO2 equivalent emissions from terminal operations at the national level. The application stated that this was lower than the national growth estimate of 0.17% based on the 2017 level, which was considered in the authorization order originally approved.
"Through this limited revision, RGLNG seeks to respond to the call for more CCS technology to be incorporated into the natural gas sector and become an industry leader in the production of greener LNG," the application said. Regarding environmental justice issues, Rio Grande said that the reduced emissions will also "naturally immediately reduce the project’s already small impact on the local environmental justice communities in southern Texas."
Noting its efforts to begin construction of LNG receiving terminals in early 2022, it seeks to expedite consideration of the CCS system in order to build these facilities "soon after this."
NextDecade announced in March that it had launched a carbon capture project related to the proposed terminal. At that time, it agreed to sell preferred shares to a group of investment companies to help advance carbon capture projects, and finally finalized a commercial agreement to approve up to 27 million tons/year of export terminals later this year. NextDecade previously estimated that the total cost of carbon capture projects including permanent storage in the US would be $63-74 per ton of carbon dioxide before receiving any benefits from the US tax credits.
As overseas LNG buyers (especially buyers in Europe) scrutinize how the purchase of US shale gas may affect their emission reduction targets, efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions follow.
Once captured, Rio Grande LNG told FERC that the carbon dioxide will be transported by pipeline to an underground geological formation, which the Environmental Protection Agency and Texas regulators will allow. The company said it has begun to determine favorable storage locations based on EPA guidelines.
It added that any pipeline that needs to transport carbon dioxide to the storage site will be under the jurisdiction of the Texas agency, not FERC.
According to FERC's application, the CCS system will require flue gas cooling, CO2 absorber, amine regenerator and reboiler, CO2 dehydration, CO2 compression and water heat recovery devices and distribution.
The company also pointed out that NextDecade and its subsidiaries have formed a joint project with Project Canary to monitor, report and independent third-party certification of the greenhouse gas intensity of LNG.
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