Hyundai Engineering & Construction Advances Floating CCS for Southeast Asia

Hyundai Engineering & Construction is planning to reduce greenhouse gases using oil and gas fields in Southeast Asia with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology based on floating bodies.

Hyundai Engineering & Construction announced on the 14th that it recently signed an agreement with the Korea Energy Technology Evaluation Institute under the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy to "develop basic design technology for sequential relocation floating CCS facilities and carbon dioxide injection concepts for distributed CCS storage in Southeast Asia." As a result, international joint research will be conducted with eight private, government, and academic institutions for a total of 42 months. CCS technology is a technology that collects emitted carbon dioxide and safely injects it deep in the ground and stores it permanently.

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The East Sea gas field, which will be reborn as the largest carbon dioxide storage in Korea. Hyundai Engineering & Construction Co., Ltd

Hyundai Engineering & Construction's national project this time is to secure the concept and basic design technology of a floating carbon dioxide injection system to use depleted oil and gas fields in Southeast Asia as carbon dioxide storage, with a total research cost of 5.8 billion won. Hyundai Engineering & Construction, a leading research institute, is in charge of the study, and eight institutions, including the Korea National Oil Corporation, the American Shipment Association, Seoul National University, and Indonesia's Pertamina University, will jointly participate in the study.

Until now, marine carbon dioxide storage has been injecting carbon dioxide through structures and pipes fixed under the sea. However, if storage is scattered in several places, such as in Southeast Asia, the floating method that can be used by moving modular injection facilities one after another is much more efficient.

In addition to floating objects using ships, Hyundai Engineering & Construction plans to develop a carbon dioxide injection system using floating concrete that can float on the sea for the first time in the world and even secure basic design approval to derive a business model. In particular, infrastructure construction costs will be reduced by 25% compared to existing fixed methods, which is expected to serve as a priming water for the expansion of CCS projects in Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, in the future.

In addition, this floating CCS technology is highly utilized in blue hydrogen and blue ammonia businesses. This is because carbon emissions from all processes of production, storage, and transfer can be minimized if a facility is established to directly treat carbon dioxide generated in the ocean during the production of hydrogen or ammonia. Through this study, Hyundai Engineering & Construction is considering expanding to offshore carbon neutral clusters such as floating hydrogen production and offshore ammonia synthesis facilities.

"The floating CCS technology is a meaningful challenge for the company, which has strengths in maritime civil engineering and various plant fields," a Hyundai E&C official said. "We will successfully complete this task and use it for the 'CCS through Borders' project to transfer and store domestic carbon dioxide abroad."

Hyundai Engineering & Construction has been working with Malaysia and the Netherlands since 2022 to conduct carbon capture, utilization, and storage research using depleted oil and gas fields, and from 2023 it will participate in the "Pre-Basic Design of CCS Demonstration Project Using Donghae Gas Field," the first CCS commercialization project in Korea.