LONDON: Saudi Arabia plans to inject carbon dioxide into the world’s biggest oil field by 2013 to trap the climate-warming gas and improve production, the Kingdom’s assistant minister for petroleum said Tuesday.
“It gives me great pleasure to announce that the Ministry of Petroleum of Saudi Arabia and Saudi Aramco are working on a demonstration project for CO2 enhanced oil recovery (EOR),” Prince Abdul Aziz bin Salman told energy ministers at a carbon capture and storage summit in London.
“A CO2 EOR demonstration project is planned for implementation by 2013. It is planned to inject 40 million standard cubic feet per day of CO2 in an area already flooded by water in the great reservoir of Ghawar.”
He said the Kingdom did not need to produce oil through EOR but that it was planning to do it as part of the global push to trap carbon emissions underground in an effort to limit the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
Discovered in 1948, Ghawar is the world’s largest oil field, with an output of around 5 million barrels per day in 2008, about half of the Kingdom’s oil production.
International Energy Agency (IEA) chief Nobuo Tanaka said the world needs to build 100 major projects for capturing and burying greenhouse gases by 2020 and thousands more by 2050 to help combat climate change.
The participants at the meeting said the world must start building by next year at least 20 commercial-scale pilot projects to test a technology which US Energy Secretary Steven Chu said could solve “20 percent of the problem” to curb carbon.
