BP SAYS CO2 MONITORING WORK WILL CONTINUE AT IN SALAH DESPITE UNREST

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
1/25/13

The oil giant BP and its project partners will continue CO2 monitoring work at their In Salah facility in Algeria despite last week’s deadly hostage situation at another gas processing facility in the country, a BP spokesperson told GHG Monitor. Subsurface monitoring, verification and accounting work will continue even with reduced staff levels and heightened security at the remote facility in central Algeria, the official confirmed this week. 

BP pulled all non-essential staff from Algeria last week after about 40 reported Islamist militants attacked the isolated In Amenas gas processing facility Jan. 16, in a move thought to be retaliation for French military intervention in Mali. After a hostage standoff that stretched on for three days and culminated in a charge by the Algerian army on the wet gas project operated by BP, Statoil and Sonatrach, media outlets reported a death toll of upwards of 80, split between militants and hostages. In Amenas is located hundreds of miles east of In Salah near the Libyan border.

‘Nothing Changes’

A BP official said that despite last week’s crisis, “nothing changes really” in terms of the CO2 monitoring project at In Salah. Operated by the same joint venture partners as In Amenas, the subsurface work there is monitoring the roughly 3.8 million tonnes of CO2 captured from the In Salah dry gas processing facility and injected into the Krechba reservoir between 2004 and 2011. The project is widely considered one of the world’s pioneering CO2 storage and monitoring efforts, helping inform modern monitoring, modeling and verification practices and regulations regarding the storage of CO2 in the subsurface. Project partners suspended storage operations in 2011 after a review of data raised concerns about seal integrity at the site even though no leakage was reported, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s CCS project database.

The future for injection operations at the facility is currently under review and will be “reached in consultation with the Algerian regulatory experts and authorities, following peer review,” according to a BP project fact sheet. That document says all evidence at the storage site “indicates that the CO2 remains fully contained within the storage complex” and that the initial goal of demonstrating and monitoring CO2 storage technology has been “successfully delivered.” The document says that post-injection monitoring work will continue for at least 10 more years at the site.