Global warming requires a strong transition effort to a decarbonized energy system. This means more efficiency in power utilization, recycling and reuse of materials, increase of renewable power generation and development of technologies able to reduce the carbon footprint.
Companies and Contractors of the energy sector are nowadays forced to be primary actors of this new sustainable era to face the challenges posed by such new scenario. The Know How and needed Innovation & Development effort involves all technical disciplines contributing to establish a backbone of knowledge and expertise in the fields of production, treatment and transport for CO2.
Saipem is spending, among other initiatives, a big effort on decarbonization in Offshore environment through the evaluation of aged assets repurposing to host carbon capture technologies. Such initiative will also find application on new offshore facilities (e.g. platforms , Floating, Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) units). The technologies for Carbon Capture from flue gas in an operating existing facility and Direct Air Capture (DAC) have been evaluated during a Research & Development (R&D) study performed since 2021 and still ongoing, with the purpose of assessing their maturity and the opportunity of their deployment in the offshore environment.
After a State of Art, Market Investigations and Technology Assessments for both the above-mentioned CO2 capture technologies, Conceptual Designs based on:
1) Saipem proprietary technology of Carbon Capture (namely CO2 Solutions) from flue gas
2) DAC system
have been performed.
During design phase, safety aspects have been evaluated: the capture modules were designed in compliance with international codes and standards, in particular for the requirement and design of safety and loss prevention systems. Main findings of the safety regulatory framework investigation are therefore provided.
The work is then complemented by a general assessment of safe and permanent offshore carbon storage and of CO2 re-use/valorization to identify the most promising technologies and processes, with particular focus on offshore applicability.
This work set the bases for the offshore deployment of carbon capture and reuse technologies initially designed for onshore applications, to guarantee the carbon neutrality of existing and future installations in marine environment or even enabling the repurposing of aged offshore facilities toward becoming carbon negative.
