The rock structures below the offshore gas and oil production province of the Gippsland Basin offer one of the best carbon sink opportunities in southern Australia according to one of the country’s greenhouse gas storage pioneers.
Addressing the first day in Melbourne today of the inaugural Paydirt 2008 Victoria Resources Conference, CO2CRC Chief Executive, Mr Peter Cook, said a study of the Gippsland Basin by his organisation had shown the potential for it to initially store two thousand million tonnes (two gigatonnes) of compressed carbon dioxide.
This was equivalent to taking out 50 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions from Victoria’s LaTrobe Valley power stations per year, for the next 40 years.
“And the Capture capability - from the pool of pilot plants now being established in the Valley - can be scaled up from there,” Mr Cook said.
“The area has a good sedimentary basin environment to store greenhouse gases, once they have been compressed into an almost fluid like state where when pumped underground, are held in that state by natural sub-surface pressure.
“We recognise that this favourable choice of carbon sink location is in a producing petroleum province so there are some challenges - regulatory and operationally - but any storage would be in strata well below known oil and gas production.”
Mr Cook said at a broader level, Victoria faced major issues in an emissions trading scheme environment as it needed to maintain the benefits of low cost energy but had to minimise emissions resulting from its use of vast coal seams for power generation.
“The upside is that Victoria is very well placed to benefit from the deployment of Carbon, Capture and Storage (CCS),” Mr Cook said.
“It has major emission sources concentrated in the LaTrobe Valley which is adjacent the future major offshore storage opportunities in the Gippsland Basin.
Mr Cook also announced steady progress on CO2CRC’s Otway project near Warrnambool – Australia’s first carbon storage project.
“We commenced carbon injection in April, have about 20,000 tonnes in place – or about a fifth of our 100,000 tonne objective,” Mr Cook said.
“The trial will run until at least 2010 and cost about $60 million.
“However, that cost should not be extrapolated across the sector’s commercial potential.
“The Otway project is very much a research and development program.
“It involves considerable trial, monitoring, testwork, analysis and verification procedures that would not apply for a fully commercial operation but which will help bring down the cost of commercial CCS projects in the future.”
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