Todd Flach

Guidelines for licensing CO2 storage operations around the globe

In January 2008, the European Commission proposed a directive on the geologic storage of CO2 in the EU. Simultaneous to the development of the directive by the EC, the CO2 ReMoVe project, funded by FP6 and industry, wrote a draft contribution to future guidelines for licensing of CO2 storage in saline reservoirs and depleted hydrocarbon reservoirs. This document contains detailed checklists for operators and authorities in each of the stages of a licensing procedure for a CO2 storage operation. The draft guidelines will be updated as results from monitoring ongoing CO2 storage operations become available. They may serve as a contribution to the regulation of CO2 storage anywhere in the world, and may be also be of use in evaluating the EU directive in the future.

Is CO2 capture and storage ready to roll

Within the context of rising overall awareness of the climate change problem, CO2 capture and storage has risen rapidly on the policy agenda. Some Stakeholders have suggested that technology, cost and legal questions around CCS are all but solved. However, while policymakers embark on the agreement of national, European and international legislation on CCS, a number of challenges arise. This paper reviews the progress of CCS towards a legally embedded mitigation option, and identifies three major conditions for the acceptability of CCS deployment: social acceptance by stakeholders and the lay public, robustness of economic and cost data, and legal and regulatory consistency. Technical maturity and reliability are important crosscutting issues that need to be fully addressed before any of the other areas can be solved. It is concluded that, although legal and regulatory issues are close to being resolved, the role that CCS may play in the global energy system has likely been overestimated in system models, which is partly due to transparency and information problems. In addition, resistance from environmental organisations may have to be reckoned with and social acceptance of CCS remains one of its most prominent unknowns.

Wind-powered Subsea Water Injection Pumping: Technical and Economic Feasibility

New technologies and solutions are increasingly more critical in the oil industry to develop marginal fields and maintain the oil production rates of more mature fields. In recent years several successful raw seawater injection systems have been implemented and new subsea water treatment technologies are under development, enhancing the methodologies and techniques used. This paper describes the potential use of floating wind turbines for powering subsea water injection facilities, stand-alone systems’, and discusses these systems’ technical and economic feasibility compared to current solutions. High-level indicators of economic and technical performance show an interesting window of opportunity for applications that can tolerate unprocessed seawater for injection in oil fields. Other configurations can also be attractive. The simplest use case considered for this article is powering a subsea pump with a local, offshore floating wind turbine to inject unprocessed seawater into an oil reservoir. Other related cases for floating wind turbine powered injection pumping are identified and discussed. Recent experience on a subsea water injection project on the Norwegian shelf has demonstrated the technical viability of injecting unprocessed seawater into an oil reservoir with suitable properties. Further, successful floating wind turbine demonstration projects have proven this new technology’s feasibility. In the conventional solution for a subsea injection manifold, the costs associated with connecting a subsea power cable to the host platform, where the electrical power for the subsea injection pump is generated, can be substantial. Under the right circumstances and conditions, it may be possible to reduce costs significantly by powering the subsea pump with 1-2 offshore wind turbines that are placed in close vicinity (in the order of hundreds of meters) of the subsea manifold. The reduced costs of this solution are enabled by the shorter subsea power cable, the elimination of incremental power generation on the host platform and, in the case of Norway, reduced taxes related to the incremental emissions of natural-gas turbine power generation for the subsea injection pump. A study has been performed where the main technical challenges of the wind-powered subsea injection pump have been considered and are judged to be fully manageable. The most significant of these are related to the intermittency of the wind turbine power generation. Wind turbine output characteristics can be designed to produce power even at low but non-zero wind speeds. The optimization problem statement for choosing a wind turbine for this application is therefore very different to the more common challenge of maximizing energy output from wind turbines installed at a particular onshore site.