Millions Of Tonnes Buried By Norwegian Platform Sleipner Platform: With planet Earth engaged in a heated race against global warming, "carbon capture and storage' (CCS) has brought a ray of hope, and a Norwegian gas platform is leading the way. The Sleipner platform in the North Sea, a mammoth steel and cement structure, has successfully buried millions of tonnes of CO2 under the seabed for the past 12 years in a pioneering project. Using a simple metallic tube measuring 50 centimetres (20 inches) in diameter, the platform operator, Norwegian oil and gas group StatoilHydro, has injected some 10 million tonnes of CO2 into a deep saline aquifer one kilometre under the sea. "We bury every year the same amount of CO2 as emitted by 300,000 to 400,000 cars,' said Helge Smaamo, the manager of the Sleipner rig, a structure so large that the 240 employees ride three-wheeled scooters to get around. The project is far from a philanthropic initiative to save the climate: StatoilHydro decided to test the carbon capture and storage (CCS) idea 250km off the Norwegian coast for purely financial reasons. The natural gas extracted by Sleipner has a carbon dioxide content of 9%, almost four times the commercial quality target of 2.5%, requiring the company to reduce the level by filtering it with amines on a platform adjacent to the main structure. Since it was already being filtered, the question was then whether to release the CO2 into the atmosphere or to capture it. A carbon tax imposed as of 1991 on Norway's offshore sector led the group to opt for the second solution, despite an initial cost of $100 million to drill a well and install a compressor, and annual operating costs of $5 million. "We save money by injecting (CO2 ) gas rather than releasing it,' said Olav Kaarstad, special advisor at StatoilHydro. With the carbon tax at its current level of $66 per tonne, StatoilHydro would have to pay $66 million a year to release one million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. But all this does not make Sleipner a "green platform.' The enormous gas and diesel powered generator that provides electricity and compresses the gas, and the flare that burns off the impurities, together release a total of 900,000 tonnes of CO2 per year