An Overview of Active Large-Scale CO₂ Storage Projects

CO₂ Capture and geological Storage (CCS) is a technology that is available today and that can cost-effectively solve up to a quarter of the global Greenhouse gas (GHG) problem. CCS can be applied to any fixed, point-source of CO₂, and will likely be most cost-effective when applied to large sources close to large sinks. While CCS has application in the oil and gas sector (both upstream and downstream), the largest sources of CO₂ exist in the power sector. Oil and gas sources are typically less than one million metric tonnes per annum (mmtpa) CO₂, whereas power sector sources are typically more than 5mmtpa CO₂. Hence a large-scale sequestration project should store in the order of lmmtpa CO₂.

Around 30mmtpa CO₂ is being injected into EOR projects, mostly in the USA and Canada. Those EOR projects are being managed to recover and re-inject the CO₂ (that they have to buy), rather than sequester it - little or no monitoring is carried out for the purpose of assuring CO₂ geological storage

As of today, there are only 4 large-scale projects on the planet which sequester anthropogenic CO₂ on the lmmtpa-scale: Sleipner (Norway), In Salah (Algeria), Weyburn-Midale (Canada) and Snøhvit (Norway). Of these the two most significant (in terms of cumulative volume injected and experience of CO₂ storage) are Sleipner (which has been in operation for 13 years) and In Salah (5 years). Weyburn-Midale is a CO₂ EOR project involving CO₂ cycling and monitoring. Although a portion of the cycled CO₂ will be permanently stored, the primary objective of the project is to recover EOR oil. Snøhvit is relatively new (starting injection in 2008) and has not yet stored a significant volume of CO₂. We focus therefore on the experience from the two large and mature projects Sleipner and In Salah. These two projects both capture CO₂ produced during natural gas processing and store CO₂ in deep saline formations. For both projects, the storage was part of the integrated Field Development Plan. They were both permitted under hydrocarbon law, and they illustrate significantly different aspects of storage: technical and commercial.