Mitigation master

As BP continues to take a strong lead in combating carbon dioxide emissions, Hester Thomas talks to Gardiner Hill, one of the company’s leading experts in the capture and storage of CO₂

Gardiner Hill

Gardiner Hill’s curriculum vitae is brief. It contains two paragraphs of text and ends short of half way down the page. It could be a metaphor for the man: focused and to the point.

As manager of group environmental technology in BP’s Group Technology function, based in Sunbury, Hill has achieved a lot in his 23-year career. Today he is a recognised expert in the rapidly emerging field of carbon dioxide (CO₂) capture and storage. Yet, given the opportunity to talk about his achievements, he avoids the personal pronoun. Instead he talks about what ‘we’ or ‘BP’ have accomplished, with himself locked firmly into a corporate team. That he represents the team seems, at times, almost a matter of serendipity, rather than the result of his own skills and insights.

A Scotsman by birth, Hill graduated from Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University with BSc and MSc degrees in civil and petroleum engineering.

‘With a personal name that could be mistaken for a geological site, some people have light-heartedly said it was perhaps inevitable that the world of exploration and production would capture my interest,’ he says with a smile.

After graduating, he joined British National Oil Company which became Britoil, to be taken over by BP in 1989. His knowledge of subterranean exploration grew steadily as he gained experience in petrophysics, well testing, reservoir engineering and the full spectrum of well technology, engineering and operations, from North Sea fields to BP’s Wytch Farm development in Dorset, southern England.

However, it was his move in becoming development manager to BP’s Western North Slope Business Unit in Alaska that proved to be seminal. During his tenure, BP set a target in 1997 of reducing CO₂ emissions from the company’s worldwide operations by 10 per cent from 1990 baseline levels, to be achieved by the year 2010 – which, for the record, BP succeeded in doing by 2002.

One of Hill’s roles was to identify ways that the business unit could reduce emissions in support of this new target.

Coincidentally, at that time Hill and his team were exploring ways of increasing the production of viscous oil resources in the region, and were evaluating the idea of using CO₂ as a solvent in these oil reservoirs for enhanced oil recovery (EOR).

‘On one hand we had BP asking us to find ways of reducing CO₂ emissions, on the other we had a challenge which could be solved by using the CO₂,’ Hill recalls. ‘In short, we could see a win-win solution. Although the concept of using CO₂ for EOR had been used elsewhere, this would be the first time emissions had been captured on such a large scale as a by-product of power generation. Unfortunately at that time the technology required was not mature enough and the plan proved to be prohibitively expensive.’

But, undaunted, Hill realised that they had hit upon an idea that could have wider significance beyond BP. Given the world’s reliance on fossil fuels to provide energy at scale for the foreseeable future, CO₂ emissions were set to rise, and if those emissions could be captured and prevented from entering the atmosphere, it could have a significant effect in reducing the greenhouse gases thought to be implicated in causing climate change. In 2000, driven by BP, an international joint industry project was established known as the CO₂ Capture Project, the first of its kind, involving 11 organisations including oil companies and the European Union, US and Norwegian governments, which together contributed $25 million to be spent on technology development.

Hill switched both job and location. He joined BP’s central Group Technology function as environmental technology manager and at the same time moved from Alaska to Washington DC to manage the project for three years.

‘The initial aim was to reduce the cost of carbon capture by at least 50 per cent through the development of new, breakthrough technology,’ he explains. ‘This was more of an aspiration rather than a realistic objective, yet we did achieve it.’

Now in its second phase, the project is tasked to reduce further the costs of carbon capture and take the technology to demonstration scale by 2008. Hill’s involvement continues as chairman of the board.

Mission on emissions

Returning to Sunbury in 2003, Hill has continued to work on developing long-term technologies for combating CO₂ emissions. His role includes acting as the BP manager responsible for the Carbon Mitigation Initiative (CMI), a project co-sponsored by BP and Ford Motor Company and based at Princeton University, USA. CMI’s mission is to lead the way in finding sustainable solutions to the carbon and climate change problem. Among CMI’s many findings and proposals made to date is the ‘stabilisation wedges’ concept, describing the scale of emissions cuts needed in the future and providing a way to compare the carbon mitigating capacities of a range of energy and storage technologies (see article 'Carbon on the rise' in this issue of Frontiers).

‘We published the stabilisation wedges paper in 2004,’ he says. ‘It has been instrumental in helping BP think about business opportunities which may exist in a carbon-constrained world.’

Realising that a lower carbon business was likely to emerge, Hill and his team have focused their attention on carbon capture and storage (CCS), based on decarbonising fossil fuels.

‘CCS offers potentially enormous benefits. For example, in the UK, by using CCS and storing the CO₂ in North Sea fields it would not only help the UK meet CO₂ emissions targets but might also enable more oil to be recovered by extending the life of the offshore oilfields and securing jobs in the process.’

It is anticipated that in 2009 full-scale demonstrations of decarbonised fossil fuels and CCS will be brought together in the world’s first industrial-scale project near Peterhead in Scotland, to generate low-carbon electricity from hydrogen and inject CO₂ into the mature Miller oilfield. Hill and his team helped develop the concept and steer the project in its early days until hand-over to the business unit for implementation. He remains an advisor to the development team. He also acknowledges that it is not all plain sailing.

‘The development of such technology requires the support of the UK and other governments. We need a whole new framework of legal and policy structures to make this commercially feasible.’

He is also chairman of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA), which he helped to set up in 2005 with the intention of bringing together all interested parties.

‘One of the major strengths of this group is its ability to provide an industry view to government.’

Also working at governmental level, Hill contributes to the debate on the direction and deployment of technology in Europe as a vice-chairman of the European Union’s 7th Framework Technology Platform for Zero Emissions Fossil Fuel Power Plants.

Cleaner future

Within the increasingly active carbon mitigation sphere, he believes perhaps the most exciting combination of decarbonised fuels and CCS came with BP’s announcement in February 2006 of plans for a new hydrogen power plant in California to be opened by 2011. This will take petroleum coke, a by-product from refining heavy oil, put it through gasification technology, recover hydrogen for power generation, and store CO₂ in a nearby subterranean reservoir.

‘This opens the door to the production of clean coal,’ points out Hill, ‘and could have enormous impact in reducing CO₂ emissions in countries such as China and the USA which have huge supplies of coal.’

Hill remains surprised at how much he and his team have achieved in just six years. ‘It’s grown from three of us in Alaska, wondering how to convince people that carbon mitigation makes sense, to it now being high on the agenda of several governments.’ He is quick to point out that other people and companies were also pursuing the same line of thought. Nevertheless, Hill has helped BP emerge as a leader in the area. In November 2005, the company formed BP Alternative Energy as the commercial vehicle for its complete ‘lower carbon’ offer.

For Hill, life outside BP involves a weekend commute to his family who live near Edinburgh, and giving time to keeping fit – he has recently discovered ‘spinning’, or gym-based speed cycling, fittingly an environmentally friendly pursuit.

So what comes next? ‘I’d like to deliver CCS through to full implementation and see BP gain technology and business benefits from it,’ he explains, quite simply. ‘We are working for a great cause – helping BP carve out a new business in a carbon-constrained world while also contributing to the stabilisation of CO₂ emissions in the atmosphere.’

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