Offshore oil and gas producer Harbour Energy has secured approval for development funding for its Viking carbon capture and storage (CCS) project in the UK. The approval is a major step toward a government-backed final investment decision (FID). The FID remains subject to project readiness and affordability assessments.
Harbour will operate the $17.4-billion Viking CCS project, which plans to transport and sequester up to 50% of the CO2 emissions produced in the Humber region, home to the UK's largest industrial cluster and highest-emitting region. Some emissions may be transported to the project by ship.
“Harbour Energy welcomes the approval of development funding for Viking CCS. This milestone sends a strong signal that the Viking CCS project can make a significant contribution to industrial investment and economic activity in the Humber,” Graeme Davies, the executive vice president of global CCS for Harbour Energy, said in a statement.
The project completed its front-end engineering and design phase and secured approval for a 34-mile onshore pipeline last year. The buried pipeline will transport CO2 to an existing 74.5-mile subsea pipeline.
The subsea pipeline has a capacity of up to 30 mtpa, but Harbour said the Viking CCS project will initially target storage of up to 4 mtpa of CO2 in the early 2030s. The project has an initial storage capacity of 400 million metric tons, and expansion phases could increase injection capacity to as much as 10 mtpa.
Captured onshore, the emissions are to be transported to an offshore facility and injected to a depth of about 9,000 ft into a depleted gas reservoir beneath a salt layer between 600 and 1,000 ft thick.
Harbour has said there are eight reservoirs suitable for CCS in its Viking fields. The company plans to fill the first reservoir, seal its wells, and move on to the next, a process it describes as the reverse of how the reservoirs were originally produced.