Storing CO2 Under the Sea North Sea, 150 Miles off the Norway Coast—The latest, greatest hope for reducing greenhouse emissions is to capture carbon dioxide at the source and bury it underground. But what is the evidence that the approach will actually work? In a word, Sleipner. That is the name—taken from an eight-legged horse in Norse mythology—of a pioneering project developed in stages since 1996 at an offshore natural gas platform in the North Sea. It is operated by StatoilHydro, Norway’s chief gas and oil company. In response to a tax on greenhouse-gas emissions imposed by the Norwegian government, each year the company now removes about 1 million tons of CO2 captured as a waste product from the natural gas it recovers and pumps more than 99 percent of it 2,600 feet beneath the seafloor into a porous sandstone formation capped by impervious rock. And there the CO2 has stayed. “The company did a great job bringing in experts from all over the world to evaluate what they were doing,” Stanford University hydrogeologist Sally Benson says. “As a result, we can say with great confidence that CO2 leakage is not a problem at the Sleipner site.” Inspired by Sleipner’s success, similar carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects are being launched in the Arctic Circle, Algeria, Australia, and Canada. For now, most of these enterprises primarily involve harvesting natural gas, an operation that can absorb the cost of disposing of the CO2 that comes up with the gas. Industries that face higher costs in converting to CCS—heavy carbon spewers such as power stations, petrochemical plants, steel mills, and cement factories—have rarely followed suit. But with proper tax incentives, they may soon sign on too. The extended Sleipner area has more than enough capacity to store all of Norway’s CO2 emissions for many years and potentially could also store a portion of the rest of Europe’s CO2 emissions well into the future—by which time clean energy technologies may have rendered CCS obsolete.
Posted on: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 05:23:59 +0000
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