A collaborative effort between universities and energy companies, known as the Net Zero Rise (Research Infrastructure for Subsurface Energy), has put forth a proposal to transform depleted oil and gas wells into the UK's first deep carbon dioxide (CO2) burial test sites. The consortium consists of Newcastle, Oxford, and Durham universities, as well as fossil fuel companies IGas and Third Energy.
With numerous active oil and gas wells across the country, the group argues that some of these wells could be repurposed to trial the injection of CO2 underground, closely monitored to ensure no leakage. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the UK's official advisors, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), have emphasized the significance of CO2 capture and storage (CCS) in addressing the climate crisis. The reservoirs beneath the North Sea present the most substantial potential for storing CO2 emissions resulting from fossil fuel combustion. However, the consortium believes that repurposing existing onshore wells would offer the quickest and most cost-effective means of researching and developing safe and effective CCS systems.
Identifying 20 suitable wells, the consortium estimates that a CCS test site would bury a relatively small quantity of CO2 at a depth of 1-3 kilometres. The repurposing of a well, along with two monitoring wells and associated equipment, is expected to cost approximately £5 million. Given that exhausted wells are typically filled with cement, the consortium suggests swift action on the proposal. Similar test sites already exist in the United States, Canada, and Australia, while hydrogen wells are also being considered as a means to ensure energy supply.
Since 1996, the Sleipner gas field in the North Sea has been operating a successful CCS project, demonstrating the feasibility of underground CO2 storage on a large scale. However, it does not serve as a test facility accessible to other organizations.
The UK government's net zero strategy aims to capture and store 50 million tonnes (mT) of CO2 by the mid-2030s. The CCC projects that up to 95mT of CCS will be achieved by 2050, primarily from biomass burning, as well as gas power stations and hydrogen production plants. IGas, an energy company with approximately 100 oil and gas wells in England, has expressed that repurposed onshore wells could potentially serve as carbon burial sites for industrial plants, cement works, and inland incinerators, allowing them to sequester their carbon emissions away from coastal CCS clusters.
