New OGCI report keys in on carbon capture potential and company successes

The Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI), a CEO-led initiative to deliver tangible, credible, transparent, and integrated contributions to climate change solutions, of which Aramco is a founding member, released a report that looks at the value and opportunities for deployment of carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) in Saudi Arabia.

In 2020, the inaugural CCUS conference was held in Saudi Arabia, and this report builds on that engagement. The report outlines the Kingdom’s experience to date with CCUS and its potential as a decarbonization tool for domestic power, desalination, and heavy industry, which account for two-thirds of Saudi Arabia’s carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. In addition, the report explores the value for Saudi Arabia of leveraging CCUS to accelerate diversification, creating jobs and shifting exports away from reliance on oil and gas and toward low carbon products and services. 

In the short and medium term, these include exports of low carbon hydrogen, as well as low carbon petrochemicals, steel and aluminum, enabled by CCUS. Long-term opportunities include using CO₂ as a feedstock for synthetic fuels and using negative emissions technologies to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. 

The report outlines business models that could be relevant for scaling up CCUS deployment, highlights potential hub locations in the country, and raises the opportunity for collaboration across the Gulf States to link hubs into a larger CCUS network — a topic OGCI is exploring further this year. 

The potential of CCUS in Saudi Arabia

The report highlights the fact that Saudi Arabia already has extensive expertise across the CCUS value chain, with two CCUS projects in operation and a high-level of international collaboration on CCUS:

• Aramco’s ‘Uthmaniyah demonstration project uses CO₂ for enhanced oil recovery injection. 

• SABIC has a carbon utilization project aimed at enhanced chemicals production. 

• Saudi Arabia is a member of a wide range of international CCUS collaborations such as the Clean Energy Ministerial CCUS initiative, the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum, and the Mission Innovation Carbon Capture Challenge, driving research, technology, and policy development for CCUS scale up.

Alongside climate benefits, CCUS has the potential to support several key goals in Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, such as economic diversification, job creation, and sustainable development. 

The report highlights that CCUS can help protect existing high value jobs and unlock significant future opportunities, including the export of clean hydrogen and additional low carbon products such as petrochemicals and steel. It goes on to note that Saudi Arabia could also opt to develop CO₂ storage resources to provide storage as a service to other countries that want to decarbonize their industrial sectors, but do not have suitable storage capacity.