THE JOY OF SHARING

Perhaps in response to the hard-fought victory for technology sharing won at the recent Bali summit on climate change, the French oil giant announced it will share everything it knows about carbon-capture-and-sequestration (CCS) with Indonesia.

It cannot hurt the progress of the fight against climate change. But will it help much? CCS, or “clean” coal is a decade from being an effective tool to control emissions. But the oil company’s use of CO2 injection for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) would be handy if, oh, let’s just imagine, they got access to the innumerable Indonesian wells with dwindling output.

How might somebody get access to such wells? By a friendly gesture like sharing technology?

In a recent talk at Cal Tech, BP’s chief scientist Steve Koonin gave a pessimistic assessment of the hope for avoiding the worst impacts of climate change and described CCS technology as one of the most important for further research.

Total to share CCS pilot project results with Indonesia
Eric Watkins, December 17, 2007 (Oil & Gas Journal)

WHO
Total SA, Indonesian Agency for the Research and Development of Energy and Mining Resources

Schematic of Total's CCS pilot project. (click to enlarge)

WHAT
In the spirit of recent agreements on technology sharing, Total will make available to Indonesia’s R & D agency information on its experimental carbon-capture-and-sequestration (CCS) project.

WHEN
The Total CCS project will perform its first injection in late 2008. Injections will continue for 2 years before final measurements.

WHERE
- Total’s CCS experimental project is in the Lacq basin near the southwestern French city of Pau.
- Indonesian oil resources are among the richest and longest-worked outside the US and Russia. CO2-injection EOR techniques would be likely to be highly effective and profitable there.

Indonesian oil resources are no longer among the world's largest but they are in a relatively conflict-free region and China is pursuing access to them so Total probably won't regret making this "generous" gesture. (click to enlarge)

WHY
- Total’s CCS project will capture emissions from a boiler at the Laq factory and inject them 4500 meters underground into a natural gas field.
- The project hopes to prove the feasibility of the technology.

QUOTES
Total SA statement: "It should enable Total to contribute to the fight against global warming and provide an efficient solution to help limiting the footprint of Total's activities in exploration and production, refining, and chemicals…"