CCS has been heavily researched by the oil and gas and coal industries as a way of alleviating carbon emissions.
However, industry feared the worse when the UK government in January backed away from a CCS project in Teesside in England’s northwest having already axed a $2 billion fund last November earmarked for critical CCS projects in Scotland and Yorkshire.
However, mid-last month two US Democrat Senators, Heidi Heitkamp and Sheldon Whitehouse, introduced a bill to incentivise the development and use of carbon capture, utilisation and storage technologies and processes.
They see the legislation as a path forward for coal while spurring the adoption of low-carbon technologies that can transform carbon pollution into useable products by extending tax credits that encourages investment in carbon capture, utilisation and sequestration.
On Tuesday a report from consultancy Research and Markets forecast the global carbon capture, utilisation and storage technologies market would grow at a compound annual growth rate of about 25.8% over the next decade to reach roughly $US15.49 billion by 2025.
Now a team of researchers from Europe and the US led by University of Cambridge Centre for CCS director Professor Mike Bickle have been studying a natural reservoir in Utah where carbon dioxide released from deeper formations has been trapped for about 100,000 years.
They demonstrated the relatively impermeable layer of cap rock that retains the CO2 could resist corrosion from CO2-saturated water for at least 10,000 years.
Although the CO2 will be injected as a dense fluid as part of its geological storage, it is still less dense than the brines originally filling the pores in the reservoir sandstones, and will rise until trapped by the cap rocks.
Bickle said while CCS was seen as essential technology if the world was to meet its climate change targets, a major obstacle to the implementation of CCS was the uncertainty over the long-term fate of the CO2 that impacted regulation, insurance, and who took responsibility for maintaining CO2 storage sites.
"Our study demonstrates that geological carbon storage can be safe and predictable over many hundreds of thousands of years,” Bickle said.
