Plan to stash pollution under seabed may save money, jobs

waste gas.

The company is spending about $109 million on modifications designed to remove about half the carbon dioxide emanating from a gas processing plant in nearby Casalborsetti. Work is largely complete, and Eni plans to begin sending the carbon dioxide through a new well into a gas field about 12 miles offshore and 10,000 feet below the seabed soon.

If this first phase goes smoothly, Eni will move to a much larger plan, initially costing as much as $1.6 billion, that will hook up factories and other large polluters in Italy and perhaps even France, to eventually draw as much as 16 million tons of carbon dioxide a year for burial.

Just as oil experts use powerful computers to crunch data into 3D images to figure out how to efficiently extract gas from the ground, they are now using similar techniques to model how to safely inject carbon dioxide into porous rock.

Launching carbon capture projects, though, is proving a grind — an indication of how challenging the energy transition may be as countries shift from some of the easier areas to clean up, like electric power, to more difficult sectors such as cement and steel.

Carbon capture needs to account for 8% of cumulative emissions reductions if the world is to achieve net zero by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organization.

Yet to be on track, the volume of stored carbon dioxide needs to jump twentyfold by 2030, to 1 billion tons a year — “a very ambitious undertaking,” said Carl Greenfield, an analyst at the agency.

Polluters are struggling to evaluate if it is worthwhile to retrofit plants.