The carbon storage project is situated in the Citronelle Oil Field north of Mobile, Alabama, which would inject CO2 captured from Alabama Power’s Plant Barry into a deep saline reservoir 9,000 feet beneath the surface. Under the project, which is to be commenced in 2011 and continue for four years would store approximately 150,000 tons of CO2 per year, which is equal to the carbon emissions from Alabama Power’s 2.657 MW Barry Plant near Mobile.
The carbon captured would be transported through pipeline and is injected to the saline formation that comprises oil-bearing formations above and below. The movement of the injected CO2 is tracked through a monitoring process and ensures permanent storage along with the saftey.
Southern States Energy Board, and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) led SECARB have selected the test site because it is representative of similar saline formations which has potential for storage of carbon. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has estimated that the storage capacity formations, that underlie in the Florida Panhandle, and Louisiana, in southern Alabama and Mississippi, at 10 billion metric tons of CO2.
The Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership program, managed by the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), span 43 states, which includes three Indian nations, four Canadian provinces and approximately 350 organizations. The partnership represents regions that encompass 97% coal-fired CO2 emissions in the US , 97% industrial CO2 emissions of the US, 96% of the total land mass of the US, and all the geologic sequestration sites in the US that are expected to be available for carbon storage.
SECARB comprises 13 southeastern states, which include Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.
