A venture by the agency of Algeria’s Sonatrach, BP, and Norway’s Statoil to plunder CO2 at a loss of idiot elastic fluid and store it underground could restore cut emissions

By Stanley Reed

Watch full size video:

About 700 miles south of Algiers, the capital of Algeria, a monumental assemblage of pipes and cylinders rises from the bleak Sahara Desert. Not far away is a diminutive airstrip and helicopter pad. And in a compound down the road, surrounded by a thick stand of trees to break the whistling winds, there are dormitories, tennis courts, even a mess room for entertainments, where a band of chefs whips up hearty meals including lobster pie and potato tarts for several hundred people.

In a way, this oil industry camp represents any exertion to turn the waste—or at minutest the natural gas Algeria exports to Europe—green. The engender, which is situated on a tiny oasis known as Krechba, is designed to undress out and cleanly dispose of the carbon dioxide contained in the gas produced by a stupendous reticulated of seven distinct fields below the desert floor.

The gas in this part of gas-rich Algeria contains about 7% CO2, on average. That contaminant even must have being reduced to about 0.3% before it is exported to Italy and other European countries. In the gone by, energy companies vented such unwanted CO2 into the atmosphere, adding to the conservatory gas point in dispute. But in this case, the partners, Sonatrach, the national oil and gas company, BP (BP), and, Norway’s Statoil (STO) decided in the sometime 1990s to store the carbon sub-oxide underground.

Executives at the site say that the In Salah Gas Project, named for an oasis about 100 miles to the southerly, is the largest so-called carbon, capture and storage venture in existence. Accounting for end for end 12% of Algeria’s elastic fluid output, it is an experiment—but a to a high degree large-scale and profitable common. Including military units intended to deter attacks by Islamic militants, who are still a serious threat in Algeria, there are some 2,000 people working on the vast undertaking.

The companies say their project, which will bring forward gas for roughly 25 years, is preventing about 800,000 tons of CO2 from going into the atmosphere annually. That’s comparable to taking 200,000 cars off the road, they say. While there are difficulties and questions, it looks like a promising step in the effort to reduce CO2 emissions from one large source: the oil and gas industry. Although not extremely publicized, In Salah attracts visitors from within the industry who want to call on allowing that there are any one lessons they can learn for their recognize oil and gas fields. Recent guests included a group from Abu Dhabi National Oil.

The added cost of disposing of the CO2 isn’t huge. Mohamed Keddam, a Sonatrach executive who serves as vice-president of In Salah Gas, put the price catchword at $100 million out of an overall $4 billion investment, or about 2.5%. That doesn’t include daily operating costs. When the partners decided to move against us with In Salah in the late 1990s, they were attracted by the opportunity to experiment through a of recent origin, mayhap environmentally kindly disposed technology. "We didn’familiarily feel it was right to vent the CO2 if we could do something else with it," says Michael Mossman, a BP executive who is also president of In Salah Gas.

Once the methane is purified at the Krechba plant to export-quality grade, it heads north in a buried commodity exported pipeline to join the Algerian gas network. The captured CO2 is pressurized by two cyclops compressors supplied by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.