- Trading house plans to sequester 15m tonnes a year for Japanese companie
According to Nikkei Asia article published on November 16, 2022, Mitsui & Co. plans to secure sites in the Asia-Pacific region to store carbon dioxide produced at Japanese factories and power plants, with plans to obtain rights for storing 15 million tonnes yearly by 2035.
By offering a comprehensive service that includes carbon capture, transportation and storage, the trading house seeks to help Japanese companies reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
"We will contribute to decarbonization by making CCS services one of the areas that we focus on," said Toru Matsui, executive managing officer at Mitsui.
Several large carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects are underway around the world as this process recently has been considered an effective way to reduce emissions in the U.S., Europe and Japan.
The process involves capturing the greenhouse gas by using a chemical that reacts with exhaust gas from factories.
The carbon dioxide typically is stored in oil and natural gas fields that have run dry. But Japan has few such sites. Mitsui has turned to the Asia-Pacific region, as the proximity makes it easier to transport CO2, and has begun feasibility studies with several local energy giants this year.
Mitsui and Indonesia's state-owned Pertamina are in the process of determining how much carbon dioxide can be stored in onshore oil and gas fields in the central part of the island of Sumatra. Mitsui also is working with Malaysia's Petronas to assess storage capacity and routes for transport ships.
In Thailand, Mitsui plans a feasibility study at gas fields held by the PTT group. Mitsui also started work with Shell covering the Asia-Pacific region, including Japan, to find suitable storage sites and research the effectiveness of underground survey technologies through around 2024.
After securing sequestration rights, Mitsui intends to debut a CCS service for Japanese companies and others as early as 2030.
Mitsui aims to store enough carbon dioxide annually to surpass 10% of the roughly 120 million tonnes that Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry sees as the minimum for CCS if the country is to achieve its goal of carbon neutrality by 2050. Few CCS projects have taken off in Japan.
But there are challenges before CCS can be popularized. The first is establishing technologies for capturing only carbon dioxide from exhaust gas, given that CO2 concentrations differ among power stations and factories. And the process of capturing CO2 remains expensive, so costs will need to be reduced.
Australian think tank Global CCS Institute estimates that 30 capture and storage projects are in operation worldwide, with more than 160 large projects being planned.
