Austrailian Government May Fund $46.5 million of Worlds Largest Carbon Capture and Storage System

The Australian government said it would pump 60 million dollars (46.5 million US) into the world's biggest, AU$850 million, carbon capture and storage system, aimed at cutting a major gas plant's environmental impact. Owners of the Gorgon gas project, which sits in a sensitive nature reserve off the West Australian coast, plan to bury 125 million tonnes of carbon dioxide -- two-thirds of what the plant would emit over its 20-year lifespan. The funding is dependent on environmental approval for the 11 billion dollar scheme to develop the massive natural gas field on Barrow Island by Chevron Corp and its partners Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell.

The operators of the Gorgon Gas project on Barrow Island plan to bury 125 million metric tons of excess carbon dioxide during the life of the multibillion dollar project. Carbon dioxide is routinely removed from natural gas during processing and is usually vented into the air, but in this case would instead be injected 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) underground.

The amount to be buried would be two-thirds of the amount that otherwise would have gone into the atmosphere, officials said.

The Gorgon Project plans to develop the Greater Gorgon gas fields, located between 130km and 200km off the north-west coast of Western Australia.

Up to 13.8 trillion ft³ of hydrocarbon reserves have been certified as proven in the Greater Gorgon area. This includes 9.6 trillion ft³ of proven hydrocarbon reserves in the Gorgon field itself - enough for a two-train LNG Project. Proven plus probable reserves in the Greater Gorgon area exceed 17.6 trillion ft³, with certified possible reserves increasing that total to 21.5 trillion ft³.The proven reserves in the Greater Gorgon area are the energy equivalent of a 2.25 billion barrel oil field. The raw gas contains 12-15% carbon dioxide.

The project proposal includes:

• Development of the Greater Gorgon gas fields involving subsea pipelines to Barrow Island
• A gas processing facility on Barrow Island consisting of two, 5 million tonne per annum LNG trains
• LNG shipping facilities to transport products to international markets
• Greenhouse gas management via injection of carbon dioxide into deep formations beneath Barrow Island

Technology: For its geosequestration project, the Gorgon Joint Venture will be using technology that is currently being used by the oil and gas industry worldwide:

• the capture of CO2 from reservoir gas is a standard part of gas processing for LNG production
• the transport of CO2 by pipeline is well understood with over 2000 kilometres of pipeline in the United States transporting CO2 to producing fields to enhance oil recovery in a process known as Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR)
• the drilling and operating of injection wells is occurring at, for example, EOR projects and demonstration geosequestration projects around the world including approx. 20 to 30Mt/a of CO2 being injected in the US for EOR and 1Mt/a being injected at both the Sleipner geosequestration project in the North Sea and the In Salah geosequestration project in Algeria, and
• techniques such as seismic surveys and downhole sensoring (e.g wireline logging; pressure/flow tests) which may be applied to the monitoring of injected CO2 are common oil field practices.

Australian Environment Minister Ian Campbell said "about 25 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions in Australia could be stored this way, so it is a vital technology if we are to address climate change."

WWF scientist Gilly Llewellyn said she was concerned about the gas escaping from "leaky" rock formations after it has been buried. She said that in the environmental impact assessment prepared by the developers, eight out of 20 potential failure scenarios were assessed as "possible" or "likely".

Sources:

Australia Plans Massive Carbon Storage System, Agence France-Presse, Nov. 23, 2006
Gorgon Project Website
Gorgon, Northern Carnarvon Basin, Australia, offshore-technology.com