China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) has commenced operations at the country’s first offshore carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility, located in the Pearl River Mouth Basin, as part of Beijing’s efforts to curb industrial emissions and enhance crude oil production.

The Enping 15-1 project, situated approximately 200 km southwest of Shenzhen, captures carbon dioxide produced during oil extraction, processes it into a supercritical state and injects it into subsea reservoirs. The platform, Asia’s largest offshore oil production site, operates at a water depth of around 90 metres and produces over 7,500 tonnes per day (tpd) of crude oil.

China has emerged as the global green energy champion and this month reported the first reduction in CO₂ emissions for the first time, due purely to the increasing share of renewables in its energy mix. However, Beijing needs to keep up the momentum as recent reports suggest there is a growing gap between China’s green transition effort and its Paris Agreement commitments.

CNOOC said last week that the new CCS facility currently injects carbon dioxide into underground storage at a rate of eight tonnes per hour. “Over the next decade, we will inject more than 1mn tonnes of carbon dioxide on a large scale and drive an increase in crude oil production of 200,000 tonnes, which is significant for ensuring national energy security and advancing toward carbon peak and carbon neutrality goals,” said Wan Nianhui, General Manager of CNOOC’s Enping oilfield operation area, as cited by Xinhua.

The oilfield contains high concentrations of carbon dioxide that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere or cause corrosion to platform infrastructure and submarine pipelines. CNOOC noted that the CCUS process addresses these risks while supporting emissions reductions.

Globally, 65 commercial CCS facilities are currently in operation, though the vast majority are onshore. The Enping project represents one of the few large-scale offshore implementations and marks a comprehensive technological upgrade for China’s offshore carbon capture capabilities, according to CNOOC.

Since the project’s initial launch in June 2023, nearly 200,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide have been injected. The company stated that with further equipment upgrades, injection rates could rise to 17 tonnes per hour, with potential annual production increases of up to 15,000 tonnes per well.

The project forms part of China’s broader climate strategy. In 2020, Beijing committed to reaching peak carbon emissions before 2030 and carbon neutrality before 2060. According to a report by Xinhua released earlier this year, China aims to cut its carbon emission intensity more rapidly than any other country and has developed the world’s largest carbon market.

The same report noted that China leads the world in installed capacity for hydropower, wind, solar and biomass energy, and has topped global new energy vehicle production for ten consecutive years.

CCS has long been seen as a silver bullet to combat global warning, but the feasibility of CCS, a central pillar in global climate change mitigation strategies, has come into question. While the Enping facility is welcome and will significantly reduce emissions connected to its oil production, CCS was promoted at the  COP28 meeting as a panacea but a recent study by Imperial College London published in the journal Nature Communications suggests that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has badly overestimated the amount of CO₂ that can be captured and stored underground long-term. That makes current plans to keep temperature rises to 1.5C above the pre-industrial baseline unrealistic.

As bne IntelliNews reported, the countdown to disaster has begun and the timelines to cross temperature thresholds has been calculated by the leading climate models: the 1.5C Paris Agreement temperature increase will be crossed in 2026 and the 2C upper limit will be crossed some eight years later in around 2037.

“The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report projects subsurface carbon storage capacity to reach between 1 and 30 gigatonnes of CO₂ per year by 2050. However, the latest analysis highlights key oversights in these estimates, particularly regarding geological, geographical and economic constraints,” the study says.

The lead author Yuting Zhang concluded that while storing up to 16 gigatonnes of CO₂ underground annually by mid-century is technically possible, the monumental increases in investment, storage capacity and deployment rates are not happening, leaving a large gap between the realities and expectations.

“The amount of carbon dioxide that can be realistically stored underground each year is less than UN estimates show,” the study argues. “Existing projections are unlikely to be feasible,” warns the report.