ABSTRACT
Capturing carbon dioxide from source points such as power plants and refineries and storing in the subsurface formations is suggested as one of the main measures to mitigate atmospheric greenhouse gases. The Longyearbyen (LYB) CO2 storage pilot is a potential site for CO2 storage on Svalbard, Norway. Longyearbyen is a small city with a population of about 2000 people in the polar wilderness of central Spitzbergen-the main island of the Svalbard archipelago at the northwestern margin of the Barents Sea Shelf (Braathen et al. 2012). The city has a 10 MW coal combusting power plant, which emits about 64,000 tons of CO2 annually (Ogata et al. 2012). The LYB pilot project was initiated by the University Centre on Svalbard (UNIS) to explore feasibility of the site to store the produced CO2 and convert the Longyearbyen to a carbon neutral community. The site is located 5 km east of the Longyearbyen city and eight boreholes (Fig. 1) have been drilled to study properties of the overburden, cap rock and reservoir.
