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Controversial carbon-burial project cancelled

Shell’s plan to inject 400,000 tonnes of compressed carbon dioxide annually under a shopping mall in Barendrecht, the Netherlands, has been cancelled after years of protest from the town’s residents.

The company wanted to use aging natural gas beds a kilometre and a half below the town as a largish-scale test of carbon sequestration. The idea was to send carbon dioxide emissions from Shell’s Pernis refinery near Rotterdam to the site, potentially beginning at the end of 2012 (Business Week).

But Dutch minister of economic affairs Maxime Verhagen told his nation’s House of Representatives on Thursday 4 November that the project would be stopped due to a ‘complete lack of local support’, as well as a delay of more than three years in obtaining permits.

“We regret the government took this decision but we also understand it,” Wim van de Wiel, a Shell spokesman, told Business Week. Update: van de Wiel reminds me that this was Shell’s only carbon sequestration project in the Netherlands – the company will concentrate now on the Quest project in Alberta, Canada, and (with ExxonMobil and Chevron) the Gorgon project in Australia.

The decision is not surprising: Barendrecht residents and the town council have for years firmly opposed the scheme, and their vociferous protests have made the project a poster-child for opposition against carbon capture and storage.

A measure of local feeling could be felt by the jeers and threats hurled at the previous Dutch minister of economic affairs, Maria van der Hoeven, when she addressed a packed public meeting in Barendrecht last December – shortly before Dutch MPs voted to approve the project. (Dutch general elections in June 2010 mean that it is a new government who have now scrapped the scheme).

Protesters saying “no to CO2” are just one roadblock facing carbon sequestration – for a look at further holdups to the idea, see my feature ‘Buried Trouble’ (Nature 463, 871-873; 2010).

Comments

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    Selvaraj said:

    Eventually nature would find it own ways. Whether humans would be witnessing it or not is an another big question.

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