The key to clean hydrogen and cost-effective carbon capture and storage may lie in old oil and gas fields, a new paper claims.
Many proposed pathways to net zero carbon emissions rely on the rapid scale-up of carbon capture and storage (CCS), resting on the assumption that subterranean saline aquifers could provide reservoir space for storing captured carbon dioxide. But very little is known about most of these saline aquifers, beyond the fact that they exist, asserts Mark Zoback, a geophysicist and the director of the Stanford Natural Gas Initiative at Stanford Univ. Injecting supercritical carbon dioxide into these aquifers also carries a high risk of triggering earthquakes.
▲ Old oil fields could be the new face of carbon storage. In a perspective article, scientists evaluate the advantages and challenges of using depleted oil fields for storage of captured CO2.
In a new Perspective article in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Zoback and Dirk Smit, chief scientist at Shell Global, argue that a faster way to scale-up is to look at partially depleted oil and gas fields as storage — and to tie CCS efforts to the production of clean hydrogen for...
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