Disponible en CD en formato PDF

Transcripción del abstract original del autor: In the short to medium term capture and storage of carbon dioxide (CO2) can play a part in sequestering already concentrated CO2-streams, such as from natural gas treatment or ammonia or hydrogen production plants. CO2-storage may provide an important route to achieve the deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to atmosphere to possibly limit anthropogenic climate change. This is believed to be good news for an increasing global population and the global economy into the 21st century. Underground storage of carbon dioxide captured from natural gas as a climate change mitigation effort was decided as a pioneering project by Statoil (operator) and partners in the Sleipner North Sea licence in 1990. Another similar decision was taken by Statoil (operator) and a different set of partners in the Snøhvit licence in the Barents Sea in the autumn of 2001. The Sleipner field has been injecting CO2 from 1996 while the Snøhvit project will start operations in 2006. At Sleipner the CO2 is extracted from natural gas at an offshore platform and injected in a highly permeable sandstone formation, the Utsira formation 1000 meters below the seabed. Utsira is overlain by 800 meters of denser rock. The Sleipner CO2-injection has been keenly studied in a broadly based, multinational R&D effort, the so-called SACS (Saline Aquifer CO2-Storage programme). In the Snøhvit case the there will be no surface installations offshore and the CO2-rich natural gas will be sent to shore in a 160 kilometre long pipeline to be processed in an LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) plant. After removal the CO2 is sent back to the field in a separate pipeline and will be injected in a separate formation under the natural gas field itself. A near term goal of Statoil is to make more constructive use of captured carbon dioxide by focusing on its utilisation for the purpose of enhanced oil recovery. In this way a large market and a widespread CO2 transport infrastructure may come into being aided by the carrot of market pull in combination with the stick of Kyoto mechanisms.