Improving Oil Recovery and Enabling CCS: A Comparison of Offshore Gas-recycling in Europe to CCUS in North America

This paper presents a comparison of European offshore gas-recycling in the North Sea to an exemplar onshore carbon capture-utilization-and-storage project (CCUS) in North America. Natural gas recycling has a long and successful history in the North Sea; while North America has pioneered the utilization of CO2 for enhanced oil recovery. With renewed interest in CO2 EOR as a means of stimulating carbon capture and storage (CCS), a simple comparison of these two gas injection cultures illuminates the potential of CCUS to change the velocity of, and cost- of-entry for, large CCS projects in Europe. The comparison of Weyburn, a large CO2 EOR operation in Canada, with Åsgard, offshore Norway, a large natural gas recycling operation, is based on a comparative CO2 price of 70 USD per tonne and conservative oil price for the last decade of 70 USD per barrel. A hypothetical offshore CO2 EOR scenario is described to illustrate how the revenue-expenditure ratios are similar for offshore and onshore projects – around 5:1 for the additional oil produced from acquired CO2. A nominal carbon tax of 35 USD per tonne increases this to 10:1, demonstrating the potential for CO2 EOR to stimulate CCS. However, large upfront capital investments and a regional shortage of captured CO2 are significant hurdles to offshore European CCUS. The comparison also suggests a CO2 emissions-storage ratio of 2:1. While this is a low carbon footprint for oil, in order for these projects to have a zero carbon footprint, they would require a transition to significant associated storage. It follows that the role of CO2 EOR in a European CCUS context is primarily to stimulate the role-out of capture and transport infrastructure, and to access to large offshore CO2 storage hubs in the North Sea