The separation of CO2 from natural gas (the North Sea fields have a particularly high CO2 content) has been an ongoing problem, and the disposal of the CO2 into geo-sequestration at the well-head a much used technology.

…In the middle of the North Sea, halfway between Norway and Scotland, is the natural gas platform Sleipner, run by Statoil. For the last six years Statoil have been removing carbon dioxide from natural gas at Sleipner and injecting it underground for permanent storage. They have to remove the carbon dioxide to improve the gas quality and until 1996 they released the CO2 into the atmosphere. But the Norwegian government created a big incentive to find another way. They started imposing huge carbon taxes on companies which emit greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. So Sleipner is the first place in the world carbon dioxide has been stored permanently underground. Or so they hope. Tor A. Torp is the engineer in charge of the geosequestration project at Sleipner.

Tor A Torp: The CO2 is being compressed into a liquid and then injected in a very ordinary injection well, which is the same type which has been used many places around in the gas and oil industry, and it’s injected down to a thousand metres below the sea bottom. At that level there is vast sand body which is several hundred kilometres long a few hundred kilometres wide and two hundred metres thick. This vast sand body - within the grains is salt water - and we squeeze the CO2 liquid in between those sand grains down a thousand metre below the sea bottom

That from a transcript of a 2004 programme, referring to “the past six years” for the age of the technology.

From that point onward, the “new” process of injection and geo-sequestration is identical to that of Statoil.

No it isn’t. This much cheaper process is NEW.

The new thing here is how cheap this process is, at least compared to other methods of sequestration.

HP,

Yes, however will he still feel the same if the process isn’t expensive?

Win/win!

Honestly, If this works, great! it will sure buy us some time.

The Norwegian Statoil projects have, I believe, reached the point where they are actually looking at the feasibility of buying liquidised CO2 from land based power stations and using that to inject into expiring oil wells to get the last of the oil out (in addition to leaving the gas down there).

The majority of global warming sceptics, as well as the proponents, can sleep well at night in the knowledge that irrespective of who might be right the consequences of our current endless debates will not be seen in our lifetimes; perhaps our childrens’, almost certainly our grandchildrens but not ours.