According to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which issued a special report on CCS in 2005, a properly selected site should securely store at least 99 percent of the sequestered CO2 for more than 1,000 years. James Dooley, a senior research scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and an IPCC lead author, considers that to be a reachable goal. "If it took all that energy to shove [the CO2] into that sandstone, it's going to take a lot of energy to get it out," he notes. "Like an oil field, where we get out half or less of the original oil in place, a lot of the CO2 gets stuck in there. It's immobilized in the rock."
Encouraged by the success of the Sleipner project, Statoil recently began another CO2 injection program at the Snohvit natural gas field in the Barents Sea, despite the requirement that they build a 95-mile (150-kilometer) pipeline on the seabed to pump the CO2 to where it can be sequestered.
And since 2005, oil giant BP and its partners (including Statoil) in the In Salah gas field in Algeria have been stripping the nine billion cubic meters of natural gas produced there annually of the 10 percent carbon dioxide it contains and pumping a million metric tons of liquid CO2 back into the underlying saline aquifer through three additional wells at a cost of $100 million.
BP uses a variety of techniques, including satellite monitoring, to observe the impact of the CO2 storage (and natural gas removal). Whereas some areas sank by roughly 0.24 inch (six millimeters) as natural gas was extracted, near the CO2 injection wells the land rose by some 0.39 inch (10 millimeters), according to Gardiner Hill, manager of technology and engineering for CCS at BP's alternative energy arm.
"The gas has been down there about 20 million years so we know [the reservoir] has integrity," he says. The DoE's National Energy Technology Laboratory is also working on developing appropriate monitoring, verification and accounting technologies.
BP and Statoil are not doing these CCS projects for charity, of course. A Norwegian government tax on carbon of roughly $50 per metric ton inspired the CO2 sequestration at Sleipner and Snohvit. "It costs a fraction of the tax," Kaarstad says. "We are actually making money out of this."
Both Statoil and BP foresee more money-making CO2 storage opportunities. Hill notes that if CCS is deployed on a very large scale, society will need the expertise of the oil industry—its "100 years of understanding the subsurface," he says. "We would expect the experience we are building through this to position BP to take advantage of any future business."
"My one prediction is that this is going to be a very big industry, storing CO2 underground but transporting it, as well," Kaarstad adds. "It's not going to happen overnight, but it will probably be as big as natural gas after a few decades."
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5 Comments
Add CommentWhat is the ultimate CO2 ppm goal for the atmosphere and why doesn't the author ask? What are we trying to accomplish? Is it to hold it at 385ppm, reduce it to 250ppm, lower it further? What if the rest of the world find out that CO2 has no relevance to climate change (as certainly seems to be the case if you look at the 540 million year record)? Will we abandon CO2 sequestration or continue because that's where we get tax revenue from? What if we find that agricultural production decreases because we are reducing the available and absolutely critical CO2? Who is advocating for Earth's flora? Who is advocating for the third world population which undoubtedly would starve if we lost the 30% agricultural gains because of the CO2 gain over the past 250 years? Do you even care?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThese efforts are quite exciting as they show that there are simpler alternatives to control the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere than those that involve large scale efforts at controling the amount of solar radiation hitting the earth or the absortion of CO2 by the oceans.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"is covered by relatively impermeable 650-foot (200-meter) thick layer of shale and mudstone (think: hardened clay)." and "We aren't really much worried about the integrity of the seal and whether the CO2 will stay down there over many hundreds of years," Kaarstad says."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou have GOT to be kidding... I strongly suggest that you look at the phase diagram for CO2: it will tell you that under the conditions specified it is a liquid - barely: let the pressure be released - such as an earthquake, or by some idiot drilling into it or something - and all of that CO2 will come boiling out into the atmosphere before you can say "carbon dioxide"...
And to think that "many hundreds of years" is PERMANENT storage... What are our ever-so-great grandchildren supposed to do?
Such suggestions are criminal.
The best form of carbon sequestration involves the process of combining the carbon not with oxygen, but with hydrogen in long chain molecules. This has the advantage that it is a solid at room temperature. It can be stored underground safely for millions of years. Perhaps old coal mines would be a suitable place to put these solid chunks.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTheodore... I can't figure out if you are pulling my leg or not... but just in case you aren't, then carbon combined with hydrogen "in long chain molecules" is really heavy crude oil, or tar, as in "tar sands", and it would take more energy to create this stuff than you get by burning the carbon to begin with. THIS IS NOT A SOURCE OF ENERGY!!!!! This is, rather, a waste of bandwith...
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