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Development of a Global CO₂ Pipeline Infrastructure

Technical Review

1 August 2010

Transport

Harsh Pershad, Kate Harland, Alex Stewart, Shane Slater, Julia Race, Paul Hunt, Paul Zakkour

Citation: IEAGHG, "Development of a Global CO₂ Pipeline Infrastructure", 2010-13, August 2010.

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Publication Overview

Projections of the scale on which CCS needs to be deployed to meet targets for CO₂ emissions reductions indicate that a massive CO₂ pipeline infrastructure will be required. To date CCS systems have tended to be based on dedicated pipelines connecting source to sink although some studies of regional CO₂ pipeline infrastructure requirements have been carried out. The purpose of this study is to examine the wider issues including design, financing, economics and regional differences.

Publication Summary

In the earlier work, data on location of gas-fields is quite location specific whereas it was found that much of the data on deep saline formations is far more generalized in some cases being only the delineation of large sedimentary basins where deep saline formations (DSF’s) are likely to be found. Furthermore there is much greater uncertainty about the potential storage capacity of DSFs in contrast to gas and oil fields where an initial hydrocarbon capacity will have been established from early in the exploration process. Thus not only are the quantities which might be stored uncertain, also the location of suitable storage sites is often uncertain or unknown. The capacity difficulty is further compounded by the use of different methods to estimate capacity by different data sources. The  injection locations also depend on whether whole formations or only structural traps can be used.

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