Smart combination of existing technologies
Our innovative installation consists of three main parts:
Offshore gas production
There are still considerable natural gas reserves to be produced from the Dutch continental shelf.
Our installation will produce natural gas from small fields already explored but not sufficiently profitable to develop and produce at this moment, e.g. because they are too far away from a gas pipeline.
The field that we have selected for the first project, 'Cranberry', achieves a daily production of 800.000 m³ of natural gas for 25 years.
This requires a total of three production wells and three CO₂-injection wells.
Circular Energy doesn't need a gas pipeline because we produce power instead of gas.
Offshore power generation
Power is produced from natural gas at times when wind farms cannot produce. We increase utilization of offshre power cables.
Our responsive load following installation includes:
- Gas treatment installation - a relatively small installation to make the produced gas suitable for the power plant
- Combined Cycle Power Plant - two gas turbines, auxillary firing of liquid components, heat recovery using steam, and a steam turbine. With a capacity of 185 MWe, this power plant generates 1,200 GWh annually
- Water systems - a seawater cooling circuit and a closed cooling water circuit for the primary process
- High-voltage infrastructure - a substation transforms the generated electricity from 11 kV to 132 kV. A cable transports the electricity to a wind farm. At the wind farm the electricity is transformed to the desired export cable voltage level.
- Remote control - the platform will be remotely monitored by an onshore control room
Offshore Capture and Storage of CO₂
The CO₂ produced in the power plant is removed from the flue gases. The compressed CO₂ is injected in the gas reservoir.
- Carbon Capture: a post-combustion amine-based closed loop solvent captures 640 kton/year from the flue gases
- CO₂ injection: we compress the CO₂ to 200 bar and inject it into the gas reservoir using injection wells specially drilled for this purpose
CO₂ capture and storage makes our installation climate-neutral. Because of the CO₂ injection, the pressure in the reservoir declines much less teh with classical gas production. Ths prevents soil residence and earthquakes.
The volume of CO₂ injected is the same as the volume of the natural gas produced. This guarantees sufficient storage capacity during the lifetime of the project.
Learn more about CO₂ injection? Click here for the presentation of Philip Ringrose.