Equinor Releasing 20 Years of Carbon Capture Data from North Sea

Written by Martin Lynch, European News Editor for Industrial Info (Galway, Ireland)--Equinor (NYSE:EQNR) (Stavanger, Norway) has announced plans to release data from the world's first offshore carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant at the Sleipner oil and gas field in the North Sea.

Since 1996, the Sleipner project has been storing captured CO2 and is the longest ongoing project on CO2 storage in the world. The project captures and stores 1 million tonnes of CO2 from natural gas each year. Equinor and partners will now release all of its datasets via the SINTEF-led CO2 Data Share Consortium in September, a partnership supported by the Norwegian CLIMIT research program and the U.S. Department of Energy. Data on CO2 storage and monitoring data has been shared with the research community for the past 15 years, but the goal in September is to make the data available to all "to further advance both innovation and development in the field of carbon storage."

"For over 20 years we have had a first-hand experience of safe storage of CO2 in a reservoir," explained Torbjørn F. Folgerø, chief digital officer and senior vice president in Equinor. "We believe this insight can be valuable for both our industry, research communities, and others working on making CO2 storage a central part of the ongoing energy transition into the low-carbon future."

Gas is injected from the Sleipner A platform into the sandstone Utsira Formation through a dedicated well roughly 1,000 metres under the seabed. The Utsira Formation is capable of storing 600 billion tons of CO2. The Sleipner CO2 gas processing and capture unit was built initially to avoid paying the 1991 Norwegian CO2 tax. Natural gas produced from the Sleipner field contains up to 9% CO2, much higher than Norway's export limit of 2.5%. CO2 is removed from the produced hydrocarbons at the Sleipner T offshore platform before being pumped back into the ground via Sleipner A. Without the CCS project, the CO2 would have been released into the atmosphere and Equinor and partners would have faced fines of NOK 1 million ($115,000) per day. As it stands, operating costs are just $17 per tonne of CO2 injected and the company receives carbon credit under the European Union's emissions trading system. The captured CO2 accounts for 3% of Norway's total emissions.

"Ever since Equinor shared the first Sleipner datasets, researchers across the world have used it to understand flow processes, enable more accurate predictions and develop methods for safe CO2 storage," said Eli Aamot, executive vice president in SINTEF. "Access to the Sleipner datasets can accelerate the development of knowledge and technologies essential for operating CO2 storage sites and enable faster deployment of CCS, a measure the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states is critical to limit the global warming."

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