ConocoPhillips has “passed the conceptual stage” and is in the early stages of engineering studies for a large-scale carbon-capture, “regassification” and offshore carbon-storage project for the industrial northeast of England at Immingham.

“We’re contemplating doing a storage project”, ConocoPhillips science fellow, Cal Cooper, told an audience of those interested in carbon capture and storage, or CCS, at an Oslo conference this week.

The project envisages harvesting liquid coal coke from surrounding industry or buying what was brought to the local English port for spin-off to hydrgen power. Carbon-dioxide will be separated and piped out for pure storage or to oilfields for enhanced oil recovery, or EOR (increased oil recovery, or IOR in Norway).

“As soon as we’re ready to value carbon, we’re ready to roll,” Cooper told OilGas24.com in the corridors of a CCS conference in Oslo at the weekend. He said the price would have to be high enough to support project costs.

Cooper said it was just one project for the North Sea that ConocoPhillips was looking at. In total, he said, projects to store 15 million tonnes per year offshore were being thought up for the next four decades, including injection-only platforms. New designs, new wells and new injection technology was on the drawing board.

Oil companies, suppliers and policy-makers sent hundreds of delegates to the conference, all eager to learn what stood in the way of carbon-capture and making money on it. They learned larger projects were sought by oil companies and suppliers, and all see governments as having the necessary deep pockets to get the emissions-cutting processes working.

ConocoPhillips at Immingham is planning a large project “because larger projects have better dollars-per-tonne metrics”, Cooper said.

In contrast with Shell and Statoil in Norway and their projects adjacent power plants, Cooper hinted such plans might not be enough to meet costs.

“Doing power by itself is challenged” he said, adding that more companies were interested in the chemical spin-offs of hydrogen and nitrogen. “We can’t replicate $25 per tonne (in CCS projects costs). In the US we say “Good luck.””

He posited that while it might make sense to begin curbing greenhouse gasses by starting with natural gas in Norway, in the rest the world it was “too expensive” and cleaning coal of its carbon was the option.

With conference-goers learning IOR was the “early market for early movers”, Cooper talked of U.S. success in the Gulf of Mexico’s Permean Basin, where it costs $10 to $25 a tonne to store carbon for IOR purposes using “25- to 35-year-old” infrastructure.

“It would be tremendously expensive to build (carbon-dedicated pipeline infrastructure) up new,” Cooper said. Yet at a U.K.-Norway, oil-minister announcement press conference on 15 June 2007 carbon capture thinkers had said new pipelines for carbon might have to be built.

On Day 1 of the conference late last week, Shell and Statoil confirmed for OilGas24 that an appraisal of North Sea pipelines capable of carrying carbon had hardly begun.

ConocoPhillips' project in the Humber Estuary would tap into 14 percent of U.K. carbon-dioxide emissions and make a 400-megawatts power plant into 10 terrawatts of Hydrgoen heat and power by Q2 2009.

Cooper said help was sought from regulators who could give carbon the necessary value to begin storing 2 million tonnes of year of by-product.