Research and development 

CO2 test rig at Statoil Research Centre in Trondheim.

Since the late 1980s, Statoil  has been initiator and active partner in various Research & Development (R&D) projects on CO2 capture and storage, both in-house and cooperative.

The world appears to be moving strongly in the direction of promoting and accepting carbon dioxide capture and storage as one of the major, medium-term methods for potentially reducing carbon dioxide emissions on a global scale.

A major result of cooperative research has been that geological storage of CO2  can be done safely. The work was mainly done in various projects that were partly financed by the EU:

SACS
CO2STORE
CASTOR
CO2REMOVE
 
4D seismic was a very important tool for coming to reliable conclusions. In these projects best practice manuals for CO2  storage are continuously updated.

For improving CO2 capture technologies several pilot units have been built and operated. The company has participated in three of those.  These pilot units give valuable results and inputs into the research programme in order to qualify new technology or optimize traditional technology.

All these pilot-units are based on the so-called post-combustion technology, which means that CO2 is removed after the combustion in a power plant. But other CO2 capture technologies, such as pre-combustion and oxyfuel, are also subject of large R&D projects, for example ENCAP and DYNAMIS.

The latest experimental and theoretical results are used for a continuous comparison in order to find out which technology is most suitable at different conditions.

The company is active in several important international initiatives like
the IEA Greenhouse Gas Program
the European CO2NET
the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum - CSLF

It is crucial for all research on CO2 capture and transport to have knowledge of the fundamental properties of CO2 and the impact of its impurities.

A new, laboratory-scale, carbon dioxide pipeline transport test rig is being used to establish operational window and specifications for offshore operations and training operators in CO2 pipeline management.