- an offshore demonstration at the Sleipner field
Reduction of the emission of gases with potential negative climate effects has been defined as one of the major goals of the Kyoto conference. Removal of CO2 from flue gases and/or from produced hydrocarbon gases and its underground deposition in offshore aquifers is currently considered as a large-scale option to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases released to the atmosphere.
Statoil and license partners started in 1996 to inject 1 million tons of CO2 per year into sands of the Utsira Formation at the Sleipner field in the North Sea. This is the first case of industrial scale CO2 storage in the world. Being the first case, careful monitoring of the behaviour of the CO2 storage facility is necessary. Thus, Statoil initiated and organized a multinational and multidisciplinary research project that will collect relevant data, model and verify the distribution of the CO2 ‘bubble’ for three years, and develop and demonstrate prediction methods for the destiny of the CO2 for many years into the future. The project serves as a test case for offshore underground CO2-disposal in general, and for possible future use of the wide-spread Utsira Formation in particular.
NOTE: The SACS project has ended in 2002, but parts of its activities are continued in the EU-cofunded CO2STORE project.