Statoil, Shell and Total have entered into a partnership to ‘mature’ development of carbon storage on the Norwegian continental shelf. Norske Shell and Total E&P Norge have joined the contract that was awarded earlier this year by Gassnova to Statoil. Phase 1 capacity is 1.5 million tpa. CO2 from onshore industrial facilities will be shipped and pipelined for injection into the Troll field.
IBM has developed a methane spectrometer ‘on a chip’ that could be used to create an inexpensive sensor network that autonomously monitors for natural gas leaks. The device can detect methane in concentrations as low as 100 parts-per-million. IBM is working with partners in the oil and gas industry to deploy the devices and replace in-person site inspection. More from the Optical Society.
Shell’s climate blogger-in-chief, David Hone, back from COP23, concludes that, ‘much remains to be done’ if the full Paris ‘rule book’ is to be finalized by the end of COP24. ‘In all likelihood, resolution will not be complete, but the process won’t falter either and the ongoing mobilization of global effort will continue.’ Negotiators will meet again in Bonn around the middle of the year and then in Katowice, Poland for COP24 where, ‘the biggest fight is most likely to be over hotel rooms.’
The US Energy Department has selected two projects as recipients of $4 million in federal funding for cost-shared R&D into the safe storage of CO2 in geologic formations following funding opportunity announcement DE-FOA-0001725. The National Energy Technology Laboratory will manage the projects which include integration of seismic-pressure-petrophysics inversion of continuous active-source seismic monitoring and joint inversion of time-lapse seismic data. The DOE also reports that its Port Arthur CO2 capture project has hit the 4 million tonne milestone.
Carbon Consult Group has been appointed official partner of the Valorisation Carbone Québec project and is to measure and validating the impact on greenhouse gases of the carbon capture and utilization technologies being tested at Suncor’s Parachem facility in Montreal-East.
At the 2017 Emerson global users exchange, Seeq demonstrated how analytics and AI to are helping the venerable Separations Research Program at the UTx/JJ Pickle Research establishment shift ‘from reactive to predictive operations.’ The unit is currently researching CO2 removal from stack gas.
The E3 Carbon Tax Calculator from RFF lets users test different carbon tax scenarios against a model of the US economy. The E3 model is described in a forthcoming book, Confronting the Climate Challenge: US Policy Options from Columbia University Press.
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