In Salah CCS

BP’s In Salah CCS project in Algeria was one of the world’s first large-scale examples of carbon capture and storage tied to natural gas production. Developed with partners Sonatrach and Statoil (now Equinor), the project captured CO₂ that naturally occurs in gas produced from the Krechba field and injected it deep underground instead of releasing it to the atmosphere. At peak operation, the system was capturing and storing up to 1.2 million tonnes of CO₂ per year, making it a global reference project for early commercial CCS. The project began injecting CO₂ in the mid-2000s using dedicated compression, dehydration, and pipeline infrastructure connected to multiple injection wells drilled more than 1.8 kilometers below the surface. Advanced monitoring, including seismic imaging and pressure tracking, was used to observe how the CO₂ moved underground. Injection was later halted in 2011 after subsurface monitoring identified pressure behavior that raised concerns about long-term reservoir integrity. Despite this, In Salah remains a milestone project that helped shape modern CCS design standards and monitoring practices by demonstrating both the technical potential and the real-world operational challenges of large-scale carbon storage.