Reduction of the emission of gases with potential negative climate effects has been defined as one of the major goals of the Kyoto conference. Removal of CO₂ from flue gases and/or from produced hydrocarbon gases and its underground deposition in offshore aquifers is currently considered as a large-scale option to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases released to the atmosphere.

Statoil and license partners started in 1996 to inject 1 million tons of CO₂ per year into sands of the Utsira Formation at the Sleipner field in the North Sea. This is the first case of industrial scale CO₂ storage in the world. Being the first case, careful monitoring of the behaviour of the CO₂ storage facility is necessary. Thus, Statoil initiated and organized a multinational and multidisciplinary research project that will collect relevant data, model and verify the distribution of the CO₂ ‘bubble’ for three years, and develop and demonstrate prediction methods for the destiny of the CO₂ for many years into the future. The project serves as a test case for offshore underground CO₂-disposal in general, and for possible future use of the wide-spread Utsira Formation in particular.

NOTE: The SACS project has ended in 2002, but parts of its activities are continued in the EU-cofunded CO2STORE project.