As the world warms up and environmental concerns are raised, carbon sequestration and storage are just a couple of the buzz words among the industrial gas industry cited as an effective and efficient means of tackling this, with Australia having now begun testing of carbon storage and pumping 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide underground.
Environmentalists are thought to believe this does little to address the issue, but Down Under CO2 is currently being stripped from a natural gas well with the intention of finding out if the scheme can be expanded to capture CO2 from coal-fired power stations – whose emissions are blamed in part for global warming.
Government-backed researchers pumped compressed CO2 into a depleted natural gas reservoir tomb 2km below dairy country in the Otway basin, west of Melbourne, with the carbon pumped into a sandstone layer holding CO2 naturally.
Although far smaller than a similar project in Algeria’s Salah gas field which is capable of storing around 1 million tonnes of CO2 each year in 1,800 meter-deep wells, the $36m project is one of a handful around the world and seen as both a significant and efficient step forward.
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