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Given the current state of affairs with regard to energy production, scientists have much more on their hands than the just finding renewable sources of energy production.  There is the question of “what to do with the by-products of the energy production process?”  There are instances where the by-products can be ‘recycled’ and used elsewhere in industry but for the large part, the by-products need dealt with, either by destruction or storage, safely.

Scientists have recently expressed the potential of the Captain Sandstone field which lies approx 30 miles off the Moray coast in the North Sea for the storage of power plant by-products, most significantly CO².  The offshore sandstone rock beds in this area are vast with one of them being larger that Belgium.  New systems aiding geological mapping have highlighted this particular area for further assessment to establish the site’s long-term storage potential of CO².  In this particular case it would involve displacing the sea water in the porous sandstone rock.

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is not a new concept and has been utilised in the USA for many a year.  However the long-term storage of CO² is a relatively new concept.  Injecting CO² into geological formations has its uses, namely with regard to the extraction of oil from depleted reservoirs.  This process is commonly known as “Enhanced Oil Recovery” EOR.  In 2008, over 5,800km of USA pipeline, was used for the transportation of CO² for the purposes of EOR.  When analysing the potential of long-term storage the transportation must be considered with pipelines being the most obvious answer.  Other methods of transporting such a product are unfeasibly costly, not to mention risky.  The whole prospect of long-term storage of CO² raises 2 very plausible questions; how safe is the storage of CO² within rock formations? And what is the cost?

The cost aspect covers 2 areas.  One, the implementation of the extraction process of CO² at power plant level, and two, the cost of creating pipeline networks stable enough to transport CO² to the offshore storage sites: the construction of power plants in the future would automatically have the extraction process built into its make-up.  One downside is that current processes mean that a significant percentage of the energy produced at a power plant is required to extract the CO².  However the argument is still stacked in the favour of CCS due to it reducing the volume of CO² released into the atmosphere by up to 90%.

The releasing of gas into the atmosphere is also a safety concern for most, especially after the natural disaster in 1986 at Lake Nyos, Cameroon.  Over 1700 people, thousands of livestock and wildlife perished through asphyxiation from CO² released from the lakebed as a result of volcanic activity.  This natural disaster highlights the dangers associated with underground storage, hence the need for further investigation into the safe long-term storage of such a gas.

It is in the North Sea that researchers from the Scottish Centre for Carbon Storage (SCCS) will consider all aspects of this storage problem, specifically cost implications and safety.  Under-sea storage is certainly a viable option worth researching in today’s global “finite fuel” scenario.