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| ØYVIND HAGEN/STATOIL |
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Putting the World on a Low Carbon Diet |
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The oil and gas industry has come up with a novel way to cut harmful CO2 emissions: put them back in the ground |
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By MATTHEW YEOMANS |
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Posted Monday, May 10, 2004 17:05 GMT
On the surface, it looks like any other weather-beaten offshore rig, with its towers of scaffolding, heavy-duty cranes and helicopter landing pad. Located in the North Sea's Sleipner West field, some 230 km off the Norwegian coast, the facility has pumped about 55 billion standard cubic meters of natural gas for Statoil, Norway's state oil company, over the past eight years. But beneath this particular rig lies what could turn out to be a cost-effective technique for fighting global warming.
Traditional drilling for fossil fuels like natural gas and oil releases millions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. CO2 is a greenhouse gas that is both naturally present in oil and gas fields, and is injected into the ground to boost the extraction process. Along with emissions from cars, fossil-fuel power stations and industry, oil and gas drilling contributes to the earth's rising temperatures. Beginning in 1996, Statoil has deployed a new method called carbon sequestration to stop the CO2 escaping: Statoil engineers remove the CO2 from the rising column of natural gas and send the greenhouse gas back into the ground, all in one continual process. So far the firm has stashed some 7.5 million tons of CO2 in a kind of emissions tomb known as a saline aquifer 1,000 m beneath the ocean floor. Statoil estimates there's room for 592 billion tons more, the equivalent of the CO2 emissions from all the power stations in Europe for the next 600 years. Canada's EnCana is also putting CO2 back into the ground, and BP and Gaz de France will be trying the technique soon. "Carbon storage is suddenly catching on," says Tore Torp, head of Statoil's CO2 research program. "Sleipner will not be a lone lighthouse for much longer."
Carbon storage and capture is not what environmentalists would call a green technology; its raison d'etre is to sustain and even increase the use of fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal (this time Next report also explores new developments in wind, solar and hydroelectric energy). But sustainable energy solutions — even imperfect ones — are needed in a world addicted to fossil fuels, and carbon sequestration could help the transition to clean, renewable fuels over the next 30 years. One reason for carbon sequestration's newfound popularity in Europe is that, starting in 2005, the E.U. will cap carbon emissions as part of its commitment to the 1997 Kyoto agreement on global warming. Installations will be assigned a carbon emission limit; if an installation exceeds its allowance, it will either have to pay a fine or purchase surplus allowances from other installations through a carbon emission trading system .
But even in areas where such schemes don't exist, the imperative for storing carbon is clear. The threat to the world's climate posed by rising levels of greenhouse gases is now accepted by the overwhelming majority of the world's scientists — even some Pentagon analysts have warned that global warming could pose a greater global security threat than nuclear war or terrorism. At the same time, energy demand keeps rising, and fossil fuels will continue to play the leading role in meeting world energy needs for decades to come. "We have a global energy system that is 85% dependent on fossil fuels, and it will take decades to change that," says Howard Herzog, who leads carbon sequestration research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Carbon sequestration is the only technology that can wean us off fossil fuels without too much of a shock to the system."
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