SECARB STORES 75,000 TONNES CO2 AT CITRONELLE IN FIRST YEAR OF OPS

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
8/23/13

PITTSBURGH—The Southeast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (SECARB) has sequestered more than 75,000 tonnes of CO2 into a saline aquifer underneath an Alabama oilfield during the first year of injection operations, according to a project official. In an interview on the sidelines of a National Energy Technology Laboratory-sponsored meeting here, Kim Sams, assistant director for Geoscience Programs at SECARB, said the first full year of CO2 injection and monitoring operations near Citronelle, Alabama has gone “smoothly.” “Everything’s really gone according to plan,” Sams said. “We had some hiccups on the front end and the planning, but once we got past there it’s been full steam ahead.”

Sams said the regional partnership plans to inject CO2 at the Denbury Resources-owned storage site for most likely another year before beginning post-injection monitoring work, but SECARB’s contract with NETL allows it to store up to 300,000 tonnes of total CO2. “At this point, it’s a matter of research. You eventually get to the place where there’s nothing more to do and you’ve met your objectives. For us, it’s not a matter of the storage site or technology, it’s about how long Southern Company and Mitsubishi would like to continue capture operations,” Sams said.  SECARB began storing CO2 captured from a 25 MW slipstream off of Southern Company’s 2,657 MW Barry Electric Generating Plant last August, piping the carbon roughly 12 miles away to the storage site. SECARB’s contract with NETL commits it to closing the storage site in 2017 following three years of post-injection monitoring, verification and accounting work.

Alabama Power, a subsidiary of Southern Company, has been operating the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries post-combustion capture unit at Plant Barry since 2011. The Citronelle project is the second large-scale CO2 sequestration effort SECARB is overseeing in the southeast. The regional partnership is also continuing to monitor CO2 being injected into a Denbury Resources-owned oilfield in Cranfield, Miss. at a rate of 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 annually from a nearby naturally-occurring source in the Jackson Dome.