Underground storage of industrial quantities of carbon dioxide in porousudand permeable reservoir rocks has been taking place for the last 11 years atudthe Sleipner West gas field in the North Sea. A further commercial-scale CO2 storageudproject has recently begun at In Salah, Algeria, and the Snohvit field, BarentsudSea, is to begin injecting CO2 underground in late 2007 or early 2008. A monitoredudCO2-EOR project is underway at Weyburn, Canada and research scale injectionudprojects have been undertaken at Nagaoka (Japan), Frio (USA) and K12-Bud(offshore Netherlands). This demonstrates that CO2 can be successfully injectedudinto underground storage reservoirs on a large scale. Natural analogues (naturaludfields of CO2 and other buoyant fluids) demonstrate that under favourable conditionsudgases can be retained in the subsurface for millions of years. Although thereudis still very significant uncertainty in the actual figures, it appears that globallyudthere is enough underground storage capacity for CO2 storage technology to makeuda significant impact on global emissions to the atmosphere. Some other major issuesudthat must be addressed if this technology is to spread to power stations, andudthus make a significant impact on global CO2 emissions, are the cost of CO2 capture,udfurther demonstrations of safe and secure storage and public acceptance thatudlong-term storage will be successful.
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