Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
6/13/2014
While most injection sites for carbon dioxide in the United States are on-shore, there is a large untapped storage resource just off the coast, according to Tip Meckel, a research scientist with University of Texas at Austin’s Bureau of Economic Geology. “Once you step off the shoreline there’s still a lot of geology beneath you. Continental shelves tend to go out different distances depending on the history of the particular continent. In the Gulf of Mexico we have an incredibly broad continental shelf as does the eastern seaboard,” Meckel said during an event hosted by the United States Energy Association in Washington this week. “We’ve looked in the Florida panhandle and we’ve looked over in the Gulf of Mexico especially and we find what everyone finds, just a lot of sand. There’s a lot of potential storage out there. This ends up being billions and billions of tons of CO2,” he said.
Outlining some of the benefits of off-shore storage, Meckel said it could result in a simpler legal process. “It’s usually a nationally owned and managed resource which changes the game quite a bit compared to an onshore project where you might be working with dozens or hundreds of land owners,” he said.
Norway Already Using Off-Shore Storage
Offshore storage has been implemented by Norway in the North Sea. The Sleipner capture and storage project captures from a natural gas facility and has been in operation since 1996. Further research has been launched into storage into the North Sea and in other areas across the world where onshore storage is less feasible than in the United States. The apparent world-wide feasibility of offshore storage could help further efforts to make carbon capture and storage a regular practice because this type of storage would work on nearly all coasts. “If it doesn’t work for everybody somehow, it’s not going to work,” Meckel said of current practices. “My underlying point is that these resources would work.”
However, other concerns remain, such as the potential risk of carbon migrating into natural gas wells. Meckel countered this argument by saying that in the process of drilling wells for potential CO2 storage, new natural gas sources may be discovered. ”There’s the flip side of things that if you have more activity you might find more stuff and that’s not to be overlooked because if you get more people thinking about it you might see more interesting things,” Meckel said. Further risks of offshore storage include the large number of wells already drilled in many areas, such as the Gulf of Mexico. These wells would have to be identified to decrease the potential of a leak should CO2 be injected into that basin which has been drilled into already. There is a potential benefit to the large amount of wells, however, Meckel said, in that because there are so many, there is a good amount of data to contribute to the characterization of basins.
