The launch of a new centre of North Sea expertise today could boost jobs and growth in Scotland, accelerate development of carbon capture and storage (CCS) and unlock three billion barrels of hard-to-reach oil from the North Sea – worth £190 billion.
The Centre for North Sea Enhanced Oil Recovery with CO2 (CENSEOR-CO2) will develop understanding of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technology, and creates a commercial use for CO2 captured from power plants and industry.
The CO2-EOR Centre is being announced today by First Minister Alex Salmond at the All-Energy conference in Aberdeen. The technology could store 75 million tonnes of CO2 from each power plant CCS project, and increase the amount of oil removed from reservoirs beneath the sea by five to 25 percent.
The Centre, involving experts from two universities, will have funding from Scottish Enterprise and Scottish Government, matched by commercial funding from 2Co Energy Limited. It will operate within Scottish Carbon Capture and Storage, a collaboration between the University of Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt University and the British Geological Survey.
The Edinburgh-based Centre will initially tackle the technical, regulatory, social and economic challenges of accelerating the widespread deployment of CO2-EOR technology across the North Sea.