The UK Government’s announcement of £20bn of funding for CCS promises that finally this eternally ‘promising’ technology will be delivered at scale. HyNet - shown here - will be a big beneficiary - well done to them!

And thus it is time to address two issues:

1. Most estimates of the carbon to be stored are little more than a ‘wet finger in the air’. What is the mix that is to be stored (CO2 vs CO vs NOx and SOx) and let’s get down to actual measurements rather than ‘engineering estimates’, ‘proxy measurements’ and guesstimates
2. Can we expect 100% ‘containment’ when stored and if not what %? And let’s not rely on the hypothesis that oil and gas fields don’t leak so carbon stores won’t. There’s a 100 years of observations onshore in the US that oil and gas fields leak…..

We need real science fore and aft the Capture Engineering!

We will address these issues in a series of webinars over the coming weeks and months.

The first one will be on Friday 21st April at 1pm: Click here for details.

Ensuring that CO2 injected into underground formations remains there seems like quite a simple problem to solve.

We can image and monitor it in the storage formation, then if it comes to the surface we can detect it with various chemical and acoustic sensors. As we start to unpack these approaches we quickly find that they are fraught with uncertainties. Many things can look like abnormal behaviour, will this mean that there is a leak and how can we be certain of the data? We find ourselves in the position of having to prove a negative, when it is very much in our interest to do so. This gives an extremely high burden of proof in a regulatory environment that puts the responsibility onto the operator to prove best practice.

On 21st April, Robert Hines’ talk will examine the methods that can be used to ensure containment and conformity of CO2 stored offshore = using layered data from multiple sources a high degree of confidence can be achieved and how operators can leverage this confidence to adapt their operations as injection continues.

KeyFacts Energy Industry Directory: Finding Petroleum