When we talk of carbon capture, most times the discussion is about carbon capture or carbon storage. Rarely has the discussions been about the transport of CO2 from the place of capture to the region where it is stored.

To some extent, this ignorance of the transport part of the CCS is understandable because transportation of CO2 - especially by pipeline - is a well understood territory and the costs of doing this is much less than for capture.

However, in one scenario, CO2 transport becomes important - this is where the individual industries emit relatively small amounts of CO2, and hence constructing long pipelines for transport may not make economic sense. In this context, I came across the interesting idea of pooling these CO2 together and transporting the pooled, larger quantity.

In my opinion, this opens up an interesting avenue by which small scale emitters could also potentially consider CCS. But of course, the capture costs are still very high, and if there is some way of bringing it down as well, we could well have a world where even small scale CO2 emitters (such as small and medium scale fermentation units) can dream of CO2.

Here is a link that might be useful: CO2 Transport R&D Project Launched by EU COCATE