courtesy Statoil

The United Kingdom will invite six consortia to bid in a November tender aimed at drawing the U.K. companies best able to make the mass capture, transport and storage of carbon offshore a reality.

U.K. Oil Minister Lord Truscott told his Norwegian counterpart Oil Minister Odd Roger Enoksen on Friday that the winning consortia would be decided in 2008. One or more operating solutions for carbon capture and storage, or CCS, will be set in motion between 2011 and 2014.

The ministerial meeting marked the acceptance of a two-country report on the challenges of CCS. The two countries will now move to begin removing the tangle of political and practical issues raised by a North Sea basin taskforce.

“In terms of the amount expected to come from government, so far it looks like we’ll have to support CCS perhaps up to 100 percent,” Lord Truscott said. Enoksen agreed costs were key to winning industry participation, although Norwegian oil company Statoil and Shell have already arrayed four of the world’s foremost carbon-capture companies.

Other Potential project spoilers are many, ranging from upsetting the planned worldwide carbon trade in 2008, to public uproar over the possible mass escape of carbon from giant geological formations in the North Sea.

The two nations will have to engage international partners to help change agreements banning the dumping of industrial waste at sea to accommodate long-term storage.

Norwegian and British experts agree carbon can be stored in salt suspension for hundreds of years before its slow release into dissolution in the ocean. Both ministers appeared keen to support carbon infrastructure building, but harped on the costs.

“We don’t know the future price of carbon,” Enoksen said, referring to the impact of prices on storage projects and vice versa.

While a review of U.K.-sector pipelines has been partly undertaken, the task is gargantuan, and the focus will be on wells and pipelines of newer types. Pipelines in Norway are full, so new pipelines in pricy stainless steel or other composite materials will have to be built.

“It takes a lot of energy to dry out carbon to keep it from acting as a corrosive agent and eating away at the pipeline,” Lord Truscott’s carbon adviser, Brian Morris of the Department of Trade & Industry, told ¬OilGas24.com.

The Task Force’s infrastructure study will be presented to ministers next month. Among issues it raised was the need to find cash incentives, continue funding projects to monitor stored carbon’s potential release into the atmosphere and attracting other countries, like The Netherlands, with an interest in carbon storage in the North Sea.