München 2004 – scientific programme

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AKE: Energie

AKE 1: „Saubere“ Kohle

AKE 1.2: Invited Talk

Monday, March 22, 2004, 11:45–12:30, HS 221

CO₂ Capture and Storage – An Update on Ongoing European R&D — •Tore A. Torp — Statoil Research Centre, Rotvoll, N-7005 Trondheim, Norway

At the Sleipner gas field in the North Sea, CO₂ has been stripped from the produced natural gas and injected into an overlying aquifer since 1996. Since then, nearly 7 million tonnes of CO₂ have been injected without any significant operational problems. The Sleipner project is the first commercial application of CO₂ storage in deep saline aquifers in the world. To monitor the injected CO₂, a separate EU supported project (Saline Aquifer CO₂ Storage, SACS) was established in 1998. Since 2003 the third phase, studying the long term behaviour of CO₂ at Sleipner and making a feasibility study of four other possible European storage sites, is ongoing.

The CO₂ at Sleipner is injected into a large high permeability sand body (between 850 and 1500m deep, occupying 2.5 x 104 km²) which is overlaid by a thick shale succession. Shales have very low permeability and are expected to provide an effective seal to the injected CO₂. As concluded by the 6 European Geo-science Institutes involved in SACS, there is every reason to expect the CO₂ to stay there the next few thousand years.

In the SACS project, time-lapse 3D seismic surveying has been used successfully to monitor the CO₂. As expected, the injected CO₂ has migrated upwards towards the top of the reservoir. Simulation tools to describe the migration of the CO₂ have shown that they can well replicate the position of the CO₂ and can therefore also be used to simulate its future behavior.

In 2004 four new major EU supported RD projects will start covering a wide range of CO₂ management from new power station concepts to storage and the basic geo-science it builds on.

The Kyoto protocol and the EU Directive on emission trading will from 2005 put a price on CO₂ emissions. At the same time the oil and gas industry in the North Sea are coming to a development phase where by using CO₂ they can extract 5-10% more oil from fields having reached the later stages of production. This will create a market for CO₂.

The presentation will finish with an indication of the cost to get the CO₂ from heavy industry and power stations on land to the offshore oil fields.