SNC-Lavalin chosen to study carbon sequestration in Abu Dhabi

Reuters’ news service reports that Canadian engineering company SNC-Lavalin has been selected from a group of five international engineering companies to study a project in Abu Dhabi for capturing carbon dioxide emissions from industry and injecting them underground.
The Montreal-based company will do a feasibility study on a project to collect the gas emitted from the United Arab Emirates’ oil and gas production facilities, power plants, petrochemical facilities and existing and new industrial plants. SNC-Lavalin will also provide conceptual engineering for processing, transporting and storing the carbon dioxide underground.
Reuters reports that the project is part of the United Arab Emirates’ plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 per cent, but it is also meant to boost the country’s oil output. Similar technology of injecting carbon dioxide into oil wells has often been used to boost production.
The Government of Canada, as well as governments around the world, is interested in carbon sequestration as a way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The C02 would be stored permanently underground in depleted oil and gas reservoirs, coal seams and salt beds, which are rocks saturated with brine, far below the earth’s surface.
While environmentalists are sceptical about the viability of the technology, and while it is expensive, others see it as an option for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The Alberta Energy Research Institute, for example, is studying ways of reducing the costs, and Saskatchewan is host to the International Test Centre for Carbon Dioxide Capture. Rock formations in the southwestern regions of the Prairie provinces are believed to be especially suitable for CO2 storage.
The companies with which SNC-Lavalin competed for the project for UAE’s Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company were Foster Wheeler, Technip, Parsons and Jacobs Engineering.