UK North Sea CO2 storage study moves into appraisal phase

Offshore staff

LOUGHBOROUGH, UK – The Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) has selected a consortium led by Aberdeen-based consultancy Pale Blue Dot Energy to work on an offshore carbon dioxide (CO₂) storage project.

This will identify the next phase of sites beneath the seafloor in theUK North Sea to store CO₂ emissions from coal and gas power stations and heavy industry plants.

ETI – a public-private partnership between BP, Caterpillar, EDF, Rolls-Royce, and Shell and the UK government – is delivering the 12-month project with funding of up to £2.5m ($3.9 million) from the UK’s Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC).

It will progress the appraisal of selected storage sites toward readiness for final investment decisions, de-risking these stores for potential future storage developers.

The project will make use of the CO₂Stored – UK’s CO₂ storage atlas – created from the ETI’s UK Storage Appraisal Project and under further development by The Crown Estate and the British Geological Survey.

Den Gammer, ETI’s Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) strategy manager, said: “Our previous projects have provided information about hundreds of potential stores under the seabed off the coast of the UK.

“This project will initially pick a ‘Top 20’ of stores from the CO₂Stored atlas and then from these select a final five which will be analyzed in much greater detail to demonstrate that they are suitable, secure, and viable for storing large amounts of CO₂.”

Additionally, it will investigate stores that could extend the use of capacity and infrastructure engineered in the £1-billion ($1.56-billion) DECC CCS commercialization competition, off the coasts of Aberdeenshire and Yorkshire is eastern Scotland and northeast England.

05/21/2015