According to the report, which was produced by two researchers at the University of Houston and published in the Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering, previous modelling of the effectiveness
of CCS is flawed because it’s based on the false assumption that pressure feeding carbon dioxide into rock structures would be constant. ‘It’s like putting a bicycle pump up against a wall,’ said one of the authors, Michael Economides. ‘It would be hard to inject CO2 into a closed system without eventually producing so much pressure that it fractured the rock and allowed the carbon to migrate to other zones and possibly escape to the surface.’

The researchers suggest that it would take a reservoir the size of a small US state to hold the carbon emissions produced by a single power station. 

The paper has proved to be controversial, with a number of geologists repudiating its claims. In particular, they have pointed to a pilot project carried out in Norway, where millions of tonnes of CO2 have been buried beneath the North Sea. However, Economides has dismissed the arguments, suggesting that they are coming from people with vested interests. His co-author, Christine Ehlig-Economides, has also suggested that the scale of the pilot project in Norway is too small to be significant. ‘It’s not anywhere near the volumes you’re talking about for real operations, for even a small power plant,’ she said.

June 2010