Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL) is looking to clean-up operations at its Gujarat oil refinery with carbon capture and utilisation technology that could capture almost 700,000 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions annually from its steam methane reforming (SMR) based hydrogen generation unit.
Dastur International and Dastur Energy have joined forces to bring what could be India’s largest carbon capture and utilisation project to life as a way of decarbonising IOCL’s operations and support the production of clean hydrogen, with support of a United States Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) grant.
Once captured, it is believed some of the captured CO2 will be liquified and purified to 99.9% for supply to food and beverage customers. That being said, the majority of the gas will be used at the Oil and Natural Gas Commission’s (ONGC) Gandhar oilfields for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) from its manufacturing oil wells.
The carbon capture system set to be deployed at the Indian refinery has been designed by Dastur and will provide IOCL with an integration solution across the carbon value chain, enabling industrial-scale carbon capture and disposition.
At this point in time, a successful Techno-Economic Feasibility study has been carried out.
Shri SSV Ramakumar, Director of R&D and Board Member of IOCL, said, “The project and Dastur’s work provide a blueprint for IOCL and ONGC to pursue the ambitious goal of combining industrial-scale carbon capture with CO2 EOR in India.”
“Dastur and its partners evaluated different CO2 sources and carbon capture technologies from multiple vendors to engineer a techno-economically feasible solution that we can implement within the constraints and challenges of a large and complex operating refinery. The novel use of advanced gas processing to provide an extremely competitive cost of carbon capture bodes well for the future success of the project.”
Atanu Mukherjee, President and CEO of Dastur, added, “I want to thank IOCL and our partners for their contribution in achieving a globally competitive cost of CO2 capture, including opex and capex in this design and charting the path forward for the first industrial-scale CCUS project in India.”
“Carbon capture and its effective utilisation is a central building block for enabling the future transition to net zero. We are committed to supporting our clients worldwide in implementing effective energy transition plans, whether it be at North America’s first carbon capture project at the blast furnaces at Cleveland-Cliffs’ Burns Harbour steel plant or a Middle East oil major’s recent plan to capture multi-million tonnes of CO2 for large scale EOR.
