The three stages of carbon neutrality, starting with bulk fertilizers
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The development of CCUS in our country lags behind international advanced levels, and its history is also shorter; to date, it has roughly gone through three stages: preliminary preparation and exploration, reserve development and verification, and expansion of demonstration and application. Phase 1: Preliminary preparation and exploration. Internationally, the development of carbon dioxide separation technologies was initially driven by the needs of industries such as natural gas, synthetic ammonia, and petroleum processing, while the development of carbon dioxide flooding technologies was driven by the oil extraction industry. Both of these technologies began to be used on a large industrial scale long before the concept of CCUS was introduced. The same is true in the domestic situation. In the 1950s and 1960s, our country first introduced three ammonia synthesis plants from the Soviet Union, and later built more than 20 such plants on its own. In these ammonia synthesis plants, carbon dioxide is primarily removed from the shift gas using the thermal potassium alkali method. In 1963, the Daqing Oil Field was the first to conduct experimental studies on carbon dioxide flooding, and the results showed that this technique had the potential to increase oil recovery by 10 percentage points. Thirteen years have passed since American scientists applied for the world’s first patent for carbon dioxide-based oil displacement technology. In the 1970s, our country once again imported thirteen large-scale ammonia synthesis units in batches from countries such as the United States, the Netherlands, France, and Japan. These devices primarily use the alcohol amine method to remove carbon dioxide. In 1984, the Bohai Fertilizer Plant installed a low-pressure propylene carbonate process unit for the removal of CO2 from associated gas in oil fields, with a processing capacity of 6,000 Nm3/h; this system was capable of reducing the CO2 content from 70%-75% to below 20%. Around 1985, the Southwest Chemical Research Institute began researching pressure swing adsorption carbon dioxide recovery technology. Four years later, the Nitrogen Fertilizer Plant in Jiangmen, Guangdong, built China’s first pressure swing adsorption industrial unit for purifying CO2 from synthetic ammonia shift gas. In 1987, the North China Petroleum Exploration and Design Institute began to pay attention to carbon dioxide membrane separation technology. Since then, institutions such as Zhejiang University, the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Tianjin University have successively begun to pay attention to and study carbon dioxide membrane separation technology. In 1988, the Daqing Oil Field in China established a CO2 flooding pilot area in the eastern transition zone of Sannan. Thereafter, the Daqing Oilfield conducted pilot field tests on non-mixed CO2 flooding in multiple oil layers, achieving overall results of reducing water content and increasing recovery rates. In 1989, leveraging the advantages of the Huangqiao CO2 reservoir, the East China Oil and Gas Branch of Sinopec carried out a CO2 injection and extraction test at Well Su88; a total of 116 tons of carbon dioxide were injected, resulting in an increase in crude oil recovery rate of over 5%. In 1995, institutions such as Huazhong University of Science and Technology took the lead in initiating basic research and technological development on oxygen-enriched combustion, laying the foundation for subsequent pilot and scale-up studies on this technology. In 1998, the Nanjing Research Institute of Petrochemicals under Sinopec began to explore carbon dioxide separation technologies based on the traditional chemical absorption method. Five years later, the new low-pressure carbon dioxide recovery technology developed by the South China Chemical Research Institute was recognized as filling a gap in China’s capabilities and reaching international advanced levels. In 2000, Tianjin University made a breakthrough in carbon dioxide membrane separation research by developing a new type of polyamine gas separation membrane material that enhances mass transfer.
Phase 2: Reserve development and testing. In the early 1990s, CCUS began to attract international attention. Countries such as the United States and Japan launched specialized research programs on CCUS. Norway, in particular, established the world’s first commercial carbon capture and storage project in 1996 – the Sleipner project – with a carbon storage capacity of 1 million tons per year. The growing international focus on CCUS and its successful implementations have also contributed to a better understanding and awareness of CCUS within the country. Furthermore, with the rapid increase in carbon emissions in our country and the growing pressure to reduce them, CCUS is increasingly being regarded as an important technology for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, the development of CCUS in our country has entered a phase of systematic research and experimentation. In 2003, China, together with the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and others, established the Ministerial Multilateral Mechanism of the Global Carbon Capture Leadership Forum (CSLF) aimed at promoting international exchanges and cooperation in the field of CCUS. In the same year, based on previous research, the Daqing Oilfield in China also established a demonstration project for using carbon dioxide in oil displacement with a capacity of 200,000 tons per year; carbon dioxide was separated from the natural gas purification plant at the Xushen Gas Field and sent to two different areas for oil displacement tests. In 2004, experts from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, wrote an article outlining the basic principles and feasibility of underground CO2 storage, and recommended that China conduct research on potential sites for carbon dioxide sequestration, carbon capture processes, the storage state of CO2 gas, monitoring technologies, and field experiments. In the same year, CNOOC Zhonglian Coalbed Methane Company constructed a carbon dioxide-driven coalbed methane extraction pilot project in Qinsui, Shanxi, injecting a total of 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide. This project is considered to be the first CCUS-related demonstration project in our country. In 2005, Sinopec’s East China Branch built a 100,000-ton/year full-process CCUS demonstration project in Dongtai, Jiangsu, where carbon dioxide was captured from chemical plants and sent to various fields in the East China oil and gas region for oil displacement tests. In the same year, the IPCC released a special report on carbon dioxide capture and storage, further affirming the important role of CCUS in climate governance. In 2006, experts from the Development Research Center of the State Council explicitly stated that developing and utilizing carbon dioxide capture and storage technologies is one of the best approaches for China to achieve greenhouse gas emission reductions on a medium-term scale. Starting from that same year, the number of CCUS-related projects in our country, supported by funds such as the Natural Science Foundation and the 863 Program, gradually increased, reaching over 40 by the end of the 11th Five-Year Plan period. In 2008, the Jilin Oilfield of CNPC established China’s first demonstration project for carbon dioxide capture and oil displacement. Carbon dioxide was separated from the Changling natural gas processing plant and sent to the Daqingzi Wellfield for oil displacement; the scale of carbon dioxide injection was 250,000 tons per year, while the scale of carbon dioxide capture reached 600,000 tons per year. In the same year, Sinopec’s Shengli Oilfield launched a pilot test on carbon dioxide flooding in Block 89 in Zhenglijiazhuang. A total of 410,000 tons of CO2 were injected in this experiment, with an oil exchange rate of 0.27 tons of oil per ton of CO2. Huaneng Group has established China’s first coal-fired power plant flue gas carbon capture demonstration project at the Gaobeidian Power Plant in Beijing, with a capacity of 3,000 tons per year. In 2009, the Minister of Science and Technology of China, at the 3rd CSLF Ministers’ Meeting, proposed giving priority to the sustainable use of carbon dioxide and replacing CCS with CCUS. In the same year, Huaneng Group built a flue gas CO2 capture unit with an annual capacity of 120,000 tons at the Second Shidongkou Power Plant in Shanghai, which became one of the largest flue gas CO2 capture units for coal-fired power plants in the world at that time. Sinopec has also established and put into operation a carbon dioxide injection for oil enhancement demonstration project at the Zhongyuan Oilfield, with a capacity of 500,000 tons per year. In 2010, the China Geological Survey under the Ministry of Land and Resources carried out a national assessment of the geological storage potential for CO2. The results show that China’s basin-level storage potential is 2,258.3 billion tons, of which 32% is in terrestrial areas and 68% in marine areas; 95.6% comes from deep saline aquifers, while 4.4% comes from oil and gas reservoirs and deep unminable coal seams. In the same year, Sinopec built a demonstration unit for carbon dioxide capture from flue gas in a 40,000-ton/year coal-fired power plant at the Shengli Oil Field. China Power Investment Group has also established a 10,000-ton/year flue gas carbon dioxide capture demonstration facility at the Shuanghuai Power Plant in Hechuan, Chongqing. That year, SNOW Group established a microalgae carbon sequestration demonstration project in Dalat Banner, Inner Mongolia, where carbon dioxide from coal chemical industry exhaust gases was absorbed to produce biodiesel and feed, with a processing capacity of 20,000 tons per year. In 2011, the State Council issued the 12th Five-Year Plan for controlling greenhouse gas emissions, explicitly calling for the implementation of carbon capture pilot projects in the thermal power industry. **The Ministry of Science and Technology also released for the first time a roadmap for the development of CCUS technology in China, clearly stating that the goal of developing this technology in our country is to provide technically viable and economically affordable solutions to address climate change. **Begin to provide more systematic support for CCUS technology research and development. In the same year, **Energy Group (formerly Shenhua Group) built Asia’s first full-scale demonstration project for carbon dioxide capture and storage in deep saline aquifers in Ordos, Inner Mongolia. The scale of carbon capture for this project is 100,000 tons per year, with 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide to be injected over the following three years, alongside research on carbon dioxide monitoring.
That year, the International Organization for Standardization approved the establishment of a technical committee on carbon dioxide capture, transport, and storage, with the China National Institute of Standardization and the Canadian Standards Council serving as the joint secretariat. Subsequently, our country became the convener of the Committee’s Working Group 4 (Quantification and Verification) and Working Group 5 (Common Issues)**. In 2012, **Energy Group (formerly State Power Group) completed a demonstration project for CO2 capture from flue gases at the Tianjin Beitang Power Plant, with an annual capture capacity of 20,000 tons; the captured carbon dioxide was used in the food industry. In 2013, the top-level planning for CCUS in our country was significantly strengthened. The Ministry of Science and Technology has issued the 12th Five-Year Plan for CCUS technology development, aimed at coordinating and comprehensively advancing the research, development, and demonstration of CCUS technologies in China. The National Development and Reform Commission issued a notice on promoting CCUS pilot projects, outlining key tasks such as pilot projects, facility construction, incentive mechanisms, strategic planning, standards and regulations, capacity building, and international cooperation. Experts from the Environmental Planning Institute of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment have also written articles suggesting the establishment of regulations and laws for CCUS, systems for permit management, environmental impact assessment, mandatory monitoring, and emergency response plans for environmental accidents. In the same year, the Shanxi Institute of Coal Chemistry under the Chinese Academy of Sciences began research and development on efficient catalysts and key equipment for the hydrogenation of carbon dioxide from industrial waste gases to produce methanol. Huaneng Group has built China’s first gas flue gas carbon capture test facility, with a capacity of 1,000 tons per year. Yanchang Petroleum has established a 50,000-ton/year CCUS demonstration project in Yulin, Shaanxi, where carbon dioxide is captured from the gasification plant of Yulin Coal Chemical Company and sent to the Jingbian oil field for oil displacement tests. In 2014, Huazhong University of Science and Technology built a 35MW oxygen-enriched combustion demonstration facility in Yingcheng, Hubei, with a capture capacity of 100,000 tons per year; it is one of the largest oxygen-enriched combustion facilities in the world. In 2015, Huaneng Group built a pilot facility for pre-combustion carbon capture with an annual capacity of 100,000 tons at an IGCC power plant in Binhai New Area, Tianjin. Sinopec established a pilot project for carbon dioxide capture and oil displacement with an annual capacity of 100,000 tons in Puyang, Henan, while Xinjiang Dunhua Company set up a similar pilot project in Karamay. In 2016, the State Council issued a work plan for controlling greenhouse gas emissions during the 13th Five-Year Plan period, proposing to carry out pilot projects for CCUS. The Ministry of Environmental Protection issued the Technical Guidelines for Environmental Risk Assessment of CCUS (Trial), setting out requirements for environmental risk prevention and emergency response measures. **The key research and development program was put into effect, funding 14 CCUS-related studies over the following three years. In 2017, the Liulihe Cement Plant in Fangshan, Beijing, built a flue gas carbon capture project with a capacity of 1,000 tons per year. China National Petroleum Corporation’s Changqing Oilfield has established a demonstration project for carbon dioxide capture and oil displacement on a scale of 50,000 tons per year. Carbon dioxide is captured from the Ningxia Coal Methanol Plant and then sent to the Jiyuan oil field in Dingbian, Shaanxi, where it is used for oil displacement. The Shanghai Advanced Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with Shanxi Lu’an Group, has built the world’s first facility capable of producing syngas through autothermal reforming of methane and carbon dioxide at a scale of 10,000 cubic meters per day. In 2018, the Baimashan Cement Plant in Wuhu, Anhui, completed a project for the carbon capture and purification of flue gas from cement kilns with an annual capacity of 50,000 tons. The Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has built an industrial demonstration plant capable of producing 10,000 tons of dimethyl carbonate per year using ion liquid catalysis for carbon dioxide conversion. In 2019, the Ministry of Science and Technology released China’s CCUS technology development roadmap (2019 edition), emphasizing that CCUS technology is an important strategic tool for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in China. It set targets for CO2 utilization and storage in China for the years 2030, 2040, and 2050 at 0.2, 2.0, and 8.0 billion tons per year respectively. In the same year, China Resources Group established a testing platform for solvent-based and membrane-based carbon capture technologies with an annual capacity of 20,000 tons at the Haifeng Power Plant in Guangdong. Baotou Steel Group launched a project for the comprehensive utilization of steel slag through carbonization processes, with an annual capacity of 100,000 tons, in Baotou. Henan Shuncheng Group entered into a partnership with Icelandic company Carbon Cycle International to advance a project for producing low-carbon methanol via the hydrogenation of carbon dioxide, on a scale of 100,000 tons per year. That year, Tianjin University developed industrial-scale carbon dioxide separation membrane modules on its own, and took the lead in building China’s first two-stage membrane-based carbon capture test unit with independent intellectual property rights, capable of processing 30 Nm3/h of feed gas; this system produced CO2 product gas with a purity of 74% from CO2-containing feed gas at a 14% concentration, achieving a recovery rate of 73.9%. In 2020, the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences collaborated with Lanzhou New Area’s petrochemical industry to build a facility that combines \"10MW photovoltaic power generation + 1,000 Nm3/h hydrogen production via water electrolysis + methanol production from carbon dioxide through hydrogenation\" on a scale of thousands of tons. In the same year, institutions such as Tianjin University built a pilot-scale plant for the production of syngas via carbon dioxide electrolysis at Yitai Chemical in Inner Mongolia. The capacity of this unit for carbon dioxide treatment is 30 tons per year, with production rates of 45,000 Nm3 per year for syngas and 22,500 Nm3 per year for oxygen. In 2021, **Energy Group built a 150,000-ton/year flue gas carbon capture demonstration project at the Jinjie Power Plant in Yulin, Shaanxi, and completed 168 hours of trial operation, making it the largest coal-fired power CCUS project in China. In the same year, Sinopec built a membrane-based carbon capture unit for flue gas from power boilers in Nanjing, with a processing capacity of 2,000 Nm3/h, based on the carbon dioxide separation membrane developed by Tianjin University. Huaneng Group has built China’s first industrial pilot unit for phase-change carbon capture with a capacity of 1,000 tons per year at the Changchun Thermal Power Plant.
Phase 3: Expansion of demonstration and application. On September 22, 2020, China officially set the goal of \"reaching peak carbon emissions by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060.\" The \"China CCUS Annual Report (2021) – Research on China’s CCUS Pathways\", issued under the leadership of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, clearly states that CCUS technology is an important part of the technological toolkit needed for China to achieve its carbon neutrality goals. It represents the only viable option for the low-carbon utilization of fossil fuels in China, serves as a key mechanism to maintain the flexibility of the power system, and offers feasible solutions for industries such as steel and cement where emissions reduction is difficult. Moreover, negative-emission technologies based on CCUS act as a crucial backing mechanism to offset those carbon emissions that cannot be reduced, thereby helping to achieve carbon neutrality. This indicates that China’s role regarding CCUS has shifted from a technology for carbon emission reduction to a key technology for carbon neutrality. **CCUS is beginning to be incorporated into higher-level strategic planning documents, and companies are actively planning CCUS projects on a million-ton scale. Thus, the development of CCUS in our country has entered a new phase characterized by expanded demonstration and application. In March 2021, the State Council issued the 14th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development of the People’s Republic of China and the Long-Term Objectives through the Year 2035. It explicitly calls for the implementation of demonstration projects for major CCUS initiatives; this is the first time that CCUS technology has been included in an important **five-year plan document. In April 2021, the **500,000 tons per year CCUS demonstration project at Taizhou Power Plant of the Energy Group was officially approved. The project is scheduled to be completed in 2023, with 100% of the CO2 being utilized through oil displacement, hydrogenation to produce methanol, and sale for food-grade use. In July 2021, the million-ton-scale CCUS end-to-end demonstration project at Sinopec’s Shengli Oilfield began construction. The project consists of two components: carbon capture from the exhaust gases of the coal-to-hydrogen plant at Qilu Petrochemical, and the storage of carbon dioxide used for oil displacement in the Shengli Oilfield; it was completed in January 2022. In September 2021, the **Central Committee and the State Council issued guidelines on fully, accurately, and comprehensively implementing the new development concept in order to achieve carbon peak and carbon neutrality. It once again emphasizes the need to advance the research and development, demonstration, and industrial application of large-scale CCUS technologies. In the same month, Huaneng Group’s Gansu Longdong Energy Company planned to build a CCUS project with an annual capacity of 1.5 million tons, and the project was approved by the Qingyang Energy Bureau for investment registration. In January 2022, Tongyuan Petroleum announced that it had signed an investment cooperation agreement with the people’s government of Kuqa City in Aksu, Xinjiang. The plan is to invest in the construction of a CCUS project with a capacity of one million tons in Kuqa City, in three phases; the capacities for phases one, two, and three are 200,000 tons, 300,000 tons, and 500,000 tons respectively, with a total investment amounting to around 1 billion yuan. In February 2022, CNPC held a meeting to advance CCUS initiatives, proposing to organize and promote the construction of demonstration projects for the large-scale application of 3 million tons of CCUS, as well as to develop an overall plan for carbon transport pipelines. Yanchang Petroleum has also begun the preparation of the overall planning design for a 5 million tons per year CCUS project, aiming to capture, purify, and compress the CO2 generated from coal-to-methanol production, and then transport it via pipelines to areas nearby for oil displacement. In March 2022, Guanghui Energy announced that the 3 million tons per year CCUS project it had planned in Hami, Xinjiang, had officially commenced construction, with the first phase involving a pilot project with a capacity of 100,000 tons per year.
In 1984, the Bohai Fertilizer Plant installed a low-pressure propylene carbonate process unit for the removal of CO2 from associated gas in oil fields, with a processing capacity of 6,000 Nm3/h; this system was capable of reducing the CO2 content from 70%-75% to below 20%.