Gas aplenty

Exxon Corporation and Pertamina,
Indonesia's national oil company,
plan to begin building offshore plat
forms that will enable them to drill
into a natural gas field beneath
South China Sea, near the Indonesian island of Natuna. The field,
one of the world's largest, was dis
covered in 1973, but has remained
untapped as engineers could not do
away with the unwanted carbon
dioxide in the valuable methane.
The gas field is estimated to contain
210 trillion cubic feet of gases,
'including about 150 trillion cubic
feet of carbon dioxide, a potent
greenhouse gas. Exxon's solution is
to separate the carbon dioxide from
the methane, compress it, and inject
it under high pressure into porous
rock formations about 914.4 m
below the ocean floor.