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CCS Projects: Global sequestering
By Allan Casey
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Norway is home to the world’s second biggest carbon capture and storage project, after Weyburn, Sask.
A top European supplier of natural gas and oil, StatoilHydro and industry partners have, since 1996, buried one million tonnes of CO2 a year under the Sleipner gas field in the North Sea. Another project in the Snøhvit
gas field in the Barents Sea stores a further 700,000 tonnes annually. Both fields produce
natural gas that is overrich in CO2 and must be removed before being piped to market.
While injection is proven technology in depleted oil reservoirs like Weyburn, the Norwegian projects involve injecting CO2 into deep saline aquifers, which are found worldwide and may have almost unlimited capacity for carbon storage but have not been tested for large-scale storage.
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StatoilHydro is also a player in the In Salah gas field in the Algerian central Sahara, where it has stored 1.2 million tonnes of CO2 a year since 2004. Like in the North Sea, this gas source — managed jointly by Sonatrach, an Algerian government company, and BP — contain excess CO2 that must be removed.
These projects are also groundbreaking from a political standpoint. StatoilHydro is burying surplus CO2 mainly to avoid the punishing carbon taxes levied under progressive environmental laws created in Norway back in 1991. The tax now stands at about $50 (US) per tonne.
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Meanwhile, in America, with sources of Middle Eastern oil never more uncertain or costly, President
George W. Bush has signalled a return to coal-based power that hearkens back to Jimmy Carter — but
with a few twists. In 2005, Bush announced FutureGen, a commercial-scale energy project that
will combine near-zero-emission, ultra-efficient, coal-fired electrical generation, on-site
carbon storage and hydrogen production. A public-private venture, the $1.5 billion FutureGen
will start with a coal-gasification process yielding hydrogen and a concentrated stream of
CO2 for capture. The hydrogen will generate power for 150,000 homes and produce
a surplus. Bush, who has admitted that his country is “addicted to oil,” continues
to promote hydrogen, though the idea has been widely discredited as the most expensive, least
efficient way of delivering fossil-fuel power. On Dec. 18, 2007, the FutureGen Alliance announced that the Matoon, Illinios, will be the site of the 275-megawatt
prototype plant. It will test clean power, carbon capture and coal-to-hydrogen technologies.
Construction is slated to begin in 2010.
At home, some industrial giants in Alberta have formed the Integrated CO2 Network, a group that hopes to be sequestering at least 20 megatonnes of CO2 a year from the province’s oil fields and oil sands in the next decade or so.
The need for new carbon capture is ever more pressing. America now gets roughly half its
electricity from coal. Offshore, China already uses more coal than the United States, the
European Union and Japan combined, in part to supply those places with cheap manufactured
goods. A global economy equals a global carbon problem.
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| Glossary Term |
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Coal seam: An underground layer of coal.
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