CO2 underground storage costs as experienced at Sleipner and Weyburn

Abstract

Two major industrial undertakings -at Sleipner and Weyburn -show the technical feasibility of storing CO 2 in underground geological formations in large volumes. Their scale makes the investment and operational costs they have experienced of interest to a wider audience.Together they cover a wide set of parameters:Sleipner is offshore in the North Sea -Weyburn is onshore on the plains of Mid-West Canada.Sleipner stores CO 2 in a deep saltwater formation -Weyburn is an Enhanced Oil Recovery project.Sleipner injects by one horizontal injection well -Weyburn uses both horizontal and vertical wells.Sleipner gets the CO 2 from natural gas produced on-the-spot -Weyburn transports CO 2 by a 330 km pipeline from a coal gasifier in the USA.Sleipner has minimal impurities -Weyburn co-injects H 2 S; a well-known Canadian procedure.This paper highlights the extra costs associated with the CO 2 injection for storage purposes only. The design and operational considerations for both projects are only summarized, since they have been reported previously. In both projects the extra equipment for the CO 2 injection/storage was part of a large industrial development project, so the costs reported herein could not be very detailed. The reported costs for the two projects are very difficult to compare since the situations were so different. SLEIPNER AND WEYBURN -TWO WORLD'S FIRSTSThe Sleipner natural gas field was the first to re-inject CO 2 to avoid emitting it to the atmosphere out of concern for climate change. Many gas fields worldwide have for decades removed CO 2 from the produced natural gas to be able to meet sales specifications-as Sleipner does. The growing international concerns over climate change and -in Norway -the CO 2 tax motivated by this, give commercial oil and gas field operations new framework conditions.

Portfolio Analysis of Carbon Sequestration Technologies and Barriers to Adoption: General Methodology and Application to Geological Storage

“…A high scoring example may be the presence of sufficient carbon tax savings through the use of CCS technology as is the case at Sleipner [27]. A low scoring example would a project which is dependent on a highly uncertain revenue stream, especially to cover OPEX.…”

“…In the presence of CO 2 emissions penalties, the CAPEX and OPEX costs can be offset through financial savings in penalty rates [27]. The cost of CO 2 avoided is lower for coal-fired CCS power plants than for some alternatives [45].…”

Historical variation in the capital costs of natural gas, carbon dioxide and hydrogen pipelines and implications for future infrastructure

“…We obtained cost data for CO 2 pipelines constructed between 1997 and 2008 from a series of public sources (in particular Denbury, 2008; Groenenberg et al, 2009;Hamelinck et al, 2001;Hendriks et al, 2004;IEA, 2009;IPCC, 2005;NEBC, 1998;Northway, 2006;Torp and Brown, 2004;UK DTI, 2002;Vandeginste and Piessens, 2006). Many of these publications also contain information on pipeline length and diameter, which enables us to express costs per km and to convert cost data to our reference of choice, i.e.…”

Potential fracture propagation into the caprock induced by coldCO2injection in normal faulting stress regimes

“…2,3 But the largest temperature difference has been reached at Cranfield, Mississippi, where it was of 55°C. 4 As for other storage sites, such as Sleipner, Norway, 5 Ketzin, Germany, 6 Otway, Australia, 7 Weyburn, Canada 8,9 and Nisku, Canada, 10 they also present a * Corresponding author.…”