TOTAL S.A. - Total Exploration Production in Pau

TOTAL S.A., with head office in the Tour Total in the La Défense district in Courbevoie, France, near Paris, is a leading multinational energy company with nearly 100,000 employees and operations in more than 130 countries. Together with its subsidiaries and affiliates, Total is the fifth largest publicly-traded integrated international oil and gas company in the world. Since January 2010, at Lacq (Rousse) in southwest France, Total has been testing the first complete industrial-scale CCS chain in Europe. This project involves:
•    capture of the CO2 emitted during oxy-combustion in a modified boiler in the Lacq industrial complex;
•    transport by pipeline to the storage site at Rousse, 27 kilometres away;
•    injection into a storage reservoir 4,500m below the surface, in a depleted gas field.
During the 3 and 1/2-year demonstration, about 90,000 tonnes of CO2 will be captured and stored.
 

The main goals of the project are:
•    to improve control over the oxycombustion process (>> Oxycombustion), which is the capture technology being tested at Lacq;
•    to reduce significantly the costs of the capture stage and also improve its energy efficiency;
•    to demonstrate the feasibility of the modification of an existing air-boiler to an oxycombustion boiler;
•    to master the complete industrial chain involving capture, transport and storage.
This experimental injection of CO2 in a depleted gas reservoir at Rousse is also intended to validate the methodology and the monitoring tools required for this type of storage, with a view to larger-scale operations in future, and to acquire knowledge to complement that gained from other international projects.