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Major carbon dump for SA
Article from: The Advertiser
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CAMERON ENGLAND, CHIEF BUSINESS REPORTER
September 18, 2007 02:15am
THE world's biggest carbon dump being planned for the state's Outback could hold up to one billion tonnes of greenhouse gases.
This is more than twice the capacity first planned.
Adelaide-based oil and gas company Santos believes a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide could be stored in its depleted oil and gas reservoirs in the Cooper Basin, compared with an original estimate of 400 million tonnes.
In June, The Advertiser revealed Santos had applied to the Federal Government for $275 million in funding as part of an estimated $714 million first-phase investment, to demonstrate storing greenhouse gases underground worked.
That project was based on eventually pumping 20 million tonnes of CO2 underground per year, for 20 years, from as early as 2010.
This would make it by far the largest carbon sequestration project in the world, but Santos spokesman Matthew Doman said yesterday it could now be even bigger.
"It comes from several things – the existence of aquifers below the Cooper Basin which could also be used to inject and store carbon . . .the other is the fact that as you use CO2 to pressurise the field and get more oil out, the removal of that oil creates more space in the oil field itself so that increases by about 20 per cent the capacity of the oil field storage beyond our initial estimates," he said.
"That the cream cannot help but always rise up to the top, well I say, <censored by peakoil.com> floats"
Jarvis Cocker - "Running the World"