Equinor to Disclose Offshore Carbon Storage Data

Published Jun 12, 2019 3:33 AM by The Maritime Executive

Equinor and its partners will disclose a dataset from the Sleipner field; the world's first offshore carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant, with the aim of advancing innovation and development of the technology.

The Sleipner field has been used as a facility for carbon capture and storage since 1996. CO2 is removed from the natural gas and sent 1000 metres under the platform, all the way down to the Utsira formation where it is permanently stored in small pores in the rock.

Sleipner is the longest ongoing project on CO2 storage in the world. Each year?about one million tonnes of CO2?from the natural gas is?captured and stored at Sleipner.

All data will be published via the SINTEF-led CO2 Data Share Consortium - a partnership supported by the Norwegian CLIMIT research program and the U.S. Department of Energy. Equinor has already been sharing CO2 storage and monitoring data with the research community for the past 15 years. By making the data openly available, the Sleipner partnership and SINTEF seek to further advance both innovation and development in the field of carbon storage.

A prototype for the data sharing will be available online for selected test users in June 2019. The digital platform for sharing CO2 storage data is planned to be online in September 2019.

The CO2 Storage Data Consortium is an open international network for data and knowledge exchange, initiated by Equinor, SINTEF, University of Illinois and IEAGHG in 2016. With the financial support from Gassnova and the U.S. Department of Energy, the project CO2 DataShare was launched in 2018.

CO2 DataShare builds a digital platform for sharing reference datasets from pioneering CO2 storage projects to improve understanding, reduce costs and minimize uncertainties associated with storage of CO2. The goal is to offer a simple, standard, and low-cost solution for making high-quality data available to the research community worldwide.

The Sleipner area embraces the gas and condensate fields Sleipner Øst, Gungne and Sleipner Vest. The Sleipner installations are also processing hydrocarbons from the tie-in fields Sigyn, Volve, Gudrun and from 2017 also rich gas from Gina Krog.