Public wary of carbon capture
30/07/2009 by FINANCIAL TIMES
By Joshua Chaffin
The new store at the Barendrecht shopping centre looks much like the neighbouring clothing shops and fast food chains, but it is much more exotic.
Like a real estate sales office, its walls feature colourful posters with diagrams of the local geology and reassuring conclusions from environmental assessments. Since April, the Dutch government and energy group Shell set up an information centre at the mall to sell to a sceptical public a promising but untested new environmental technology: carbon capture and storage.
CCS, as it is known, involves capturing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, factories and other installations and burying them deep underground where they cannot rise into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming.
But the technology, which could account for a fifth of all emissions reductions from power plants and industry by 2050, has not yet been tested on a grand scale. Before its backers can launch it across Europe, they must overcome public concerns about its safety.
Nowhere is that challenge more apparent than in Barendrecht, a leafy and densely-packed town of 45,000 that has become a public testing ground for CCS.
Almost 2km below the shopping centre lies a nearly spent natural gas reservoir that Shell and the Dutch government were planning to pump full of carbon dioxide from a nearby refinery to test the technology.
So far, though, CCS has proved to be a tough sell. "It's become clear that there is no public acceptance for carbon capture and storage in the boundaries of this community," said Simon Zuurbier, the town alderman who has emerged as a leading opponent of the technology.
Barendrecht residents cite concerns, from the dangers of living and working above tonnes of noxious gas to more banal worries about property prices. They have managed to delay Shell's plans. They are braced for a tougher fight as the federal government prepares a final ruling on the project before the year-end.
The Netherlands is not the only place where CCS is meeting opposition. Last month, Berlin was forced to postpone a law that would govern carbon storage after complaints from the governments of regions where many of the sites would be located.
Those sorts of delays are raising alarm in the industry that CCS could become mired in a political and regulatory thicket before it can ever be deployed.
"The greatest challenge facing CCS is not so much technical as it is one of perception," said Eric Drosin of Zero Emissions Platform, a CCS advocacy group that includes energy companies like Shell as well as some environmental groups. "The technology is virtually unknown among the general public."
The Netherlands would seem to be an ideal place to introduce CCS. It is renowned for its progressive environmental policies and also features a warren of ageing gas fields to swallow the carbon spewed out by its large industrial base.
Two of those are in Barendrecht, just 18km away from Shell's Pernis refinery, which produces about 1m tonnes of carbon-dioxide a year. Currently, about half of that is shipped to soda factories and greenhouses while the rest floats away.
For the Dutch government, the project represented its first onshore attempt to store carbon, and a necessary step before undertaking the much larger CCS projects it is planning for 2015. As such, it has agreed to contribute up to €29.75m ($41.75m, £25.5m) to Shell to support the project.
But almost immediately, the company bungled the public relations. In late 2007, Mr Zuurbier and other town leaders were irritated to learn of the project from the company and not the Dutch government.
Resistance only seemed to harden after Shell executives travelled to Barendrecht early the next year to make a presentation to residents, the mayor and the town's 27-member commission, most of whom had only a passing knowledge of CCS. Soon Barendrecht was searching for its own legal representation and scientists so that it could build a case to rebut the project. (It was not easy to find help, since most engineers who deal with the technology have some tie to industry.)
Shell declined to comment directly on the matter, but executives conceded that they were surprised by the local reaction.
Mr Zuurbier, a former ship pilot, insisted that he and other opponents were hardly radical, anti-globalisation protesters but educated and upstanding citizens.
He supported the environmental legislation of the 1960s and 1970s that led the Netherlands to clean up sites polluted by its chemicals industry, but views CCS as an expensive and possibly dangerous risk.
For Ron Van Der Mark, 25, an agent at the ReMax Makelaarsgroep real estate office, the concerns are more commercial. "New people are afraid of living in Barendrecht," he said.
In April, the company appeared to win a big victory when an independent environment commission endorsed Shell's plan, and concluded that the project was sound.
More recently, Jacqueline Cramer, Dutch environment minister, a scientist by training, has gone out of her way to try to build trust among residents. She said: "In the worst case, if we really need Barendrecht, and Barendrecht doesn't want it, we can force them. But at the moment, that's not the way we want to deal with the issue."
But there may be another challenge that she and Shell overlooked when it comes to selling CCS in Barendrecht: a fatigue with urban development. Over the last decade, residents have had to endure the construction of a new high-speed rail line that bisects the town in order to connect the Rotterdam port to Germany. There are also ribbons of fresh highway all around them. The CCS plant would now bring a snaking pipeline to carry the gas.
It is hard to know how much that frustration accounted for the mood in Barendrecht on the evening of February 18, when residents gathered to hear both Shell and the local government make their case. So many people turned up - more than 1,100 - that the meeting had to be spread across two venues, the local theatre and town hall.
"It was a tense feeling," said Mr Van Der Mark, who praised the Shell presentation that evening as clear and convincing but suspected it made little difference. "A lot of people are against it and they won't be convinced by any presentation."
Copyright 2009 Financial Times Limited
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