Team ready to keep toxic gas underground

An international research team is heading to the southeast corner of Saskatchewan to check on millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide buried beneath the frozen fields. They want to ensure the notorious greenhouse gas stays more than a kilometre underground in perpetuity and doesn’t leak out of oil wells that have turned the Canadian prairies into a geological pincushion.

“We hope to be going full bore by the end of January,” Brian Kristoff, acting executive director of the Petroleum Technology Research Centre in Regina, says of the $40-million final phase of the Weyburn CO2 Monitoring and Storage Project.

The project, supported by the International Energy Agency and the Canadian and U.S. governments, is one of the most ambitious efforts in the world to assess what happens when CO2 is pumped below ground.

Since 2000, more than seven million tonnes of carbon dioxide that would otherwise have risen into the atmosphere have been injected into the porous rock far beneath the farmers’ fields just south of Weyburn. The first $42-million phase of the project showed underground CO2 storage holds much promise. The next phase aims to devise the monitoring tools needed to assure the public CO2 storage can be safely managed.

CanWest News Service