Worker safety in a mature carbon capture and storage industry in the United States based upon analog industry experience

Worker safety in a mature carbon capture and storage industry in the United States based upon analog industry experience Preston D. Jordan a,∗ , Sally M. Benson b a b Earth Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, United States Department of Energy Resources Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, United States abstract Insight into worker safety in a mature carbon capture and storage (CCS) industry in the United States (US) can be gained by analogy to a variety of existing industries. Worker safety in capture facility construction will be below median, as is typical for construction. Worker safety in capture operation will be above median based on the oil refining, fossil fuel electric power generation, and industrial gas processing analogs. Pipeline construction and operation worker injury rates will be below median based on analogy with oil and gas pipeline construction and operation; however construction will have the unfortunately typical high fatality rate. Storage field worker safety will be mixed with below median injury rates but high fatality rates based on the oil and gas production analog. Still, safety in the oil and gas production analog is better than in the heavy and civil engineering construction industry and much better than in some other common industries, such as marine and truck transportation. CCS worker safety will be greater than the analogs due to the lack of flammable fluid handling, extremely high or low temperatures, product transportation by truck, and relatively less drilling effort, more geophysics effort, and more onshore work. Many of these differences also suggest CCS will be safer for the public than the analogs. 1. Introduction Storage of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) in permeable rocks in the sub- surface is one option for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the future. As currently envisioned, CO 2 from large, stationary emis- sion sources, such as power plants and cement factories, would be separated (captured) from the flue gas,purified and compressed to a liquid state. The CO 2 liquid would be transported by pipeline to a suitable storage field where it would be injected into the subsurface for storage in a supercritical state. Likely suitable storage fields are oil and gas reservoirs and permeable rocks filled with brine (saline aquifers) beneath relatively impermeable cap rocks meeting var- ious criteria, such as pressure and temperature. Fig. 1 shows the portions of the coterminous United States (US) underlain by saline aquifers assessed as meeting these criteria as well as the location of all hydrocarbon wells as of 2008. Taken as a whole, the industry described above is typi- cally termed the carbon capture and storage (CCS) industry (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], 2005). The safety of such an industry is an area of active study. For instance Ha- Duong and Loisel (2011) projected hundreds of additional fatalities ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 510 486 6774; fax: +1 510 486 5686. E-mail address: pdjordan@lbl.gov (P.D. Jordan). Worldwide resulting from such an industry through 2050. Most of the fatalities were due to mining and rail transportation of addi- tional coal to power capture plants. However it is by no means assured that coal will be the energy source for such plants. For instance the planned post-combustion capture unit on the coal- fired Petra Nova power plant in Texas will be operated on natural gas. In addition, there is considerable uncertainty in projecting how much energy will be needed for capture as the technology develops. More broadly, numerous studies have identified uncertainties bearing on the environmental and/or public impact of CCS (Wildaya et al., 2011; Koornneef et al., 2012). In general worker safety had not been a particular focus of study, nor what can be learned from exist- ing worker safety data in closely related industries. Such research is motivated by conclusions drawn by the IPCC (2005) indicating that “the local health, safety and environment risks of geological stor- age would be comparable to risks of current activities such as natural gas storage, EOR, and deep underground disposal of acid gas.” It could help bound the uncertainty regarding this key group, and perhaps also provide some perspective on impacts on the public and envi- ronment. This paper pursues such study to develop a perspective on worker safety in a mature CCS industry in the US, using data from current industrial analogs. In particular, this study considers (1) all nonfatal cases of on-the-job injury and/or illness, (2) cases with days away from work due to on-the-job injury and illness, and