In Salah

Facts:

The In Salah gas project in central Algeria is a joint venture between national energy company Sonatrach, BP and Statoil to produce 9 billion cubic metres of market-ready gas, a major source of gas exports to southern Europe.

The project focuses on three gas fields in the Ahnet-Timimoun Basin, where CO2 content ranges between 1% and 9%. Rather than venting the CO2 − an established practice on other similar projects − it is compressed and re-injected into the aquifer zone of one of the shallow gas reservoirs. About 1.2 million tonnes of CO2 is injected every year.

Gas produced from the Tegentour and Reg fields is dehydrated then transported 120 kilometres to a central processing facility at Krechba, where about 1.4 million cubic metres of CO2 are produced per day using amine capture technology. The CO2 is then re-injected at high pressure into the Krechba reservoir.

The venture partners have submitted a proposal to include carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies in the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), drawing on their experience at In Salah. Their proposed approach forms part of the ongoing debate over CCS and CDM.

Other Sources and Press Release:

Monitoring CO2 storage
BP In Salah project website
Statoil In Salah project website