SLEIPNER PLATFORM, North Sea — Buffeted by crosswinds, the lone helicopter flew on for an hour across the shale-gray waves of the North Sea with no destination in sight.
A relief crew huddled unsteadily inside, sweating in their 20-pound immersion suits, festooned with safety whistles, buddy lines, emergency lights and inflatable life vests. Even in summer, survival in the choppy 40-degree water is measured in minutes.
Finally -- far off the coast of Norway -- the superstructure of the Sleipner platform came into view, towering 500 feet above the swell at this watery crossroads of 3,000 miles of undersea petroleum pipelines that carry natural gas for 50 million European customers.
Only one pipe led from the platform back into the seafloor. It carried industrial carbon dioxide deep into the earth from which it came.
Here, on the remote Sleipner refinery complex, the business of global warming is taking shape.
Since 1996, Norway's largest petroleum company -- Statoil -- has been injecting 1 million tons of carbon dioxide every year from the Sleipner complex into undersea sediments to keep the potent greenhouse gas from venting into the atmosphere.
Statoil's engineers aren't doing it to save the environment, but to save money. The Sleipner injection facility, which cost about $80 million to build, saves Statoil $53 million every year in Norwegian taxes on carbon dioxide emissions.
In areas such as California -- where lawmakers passed a bill last week to curb industrial carbon dioxide emissions 25% by 2020 -- the Sleipner platform is a harbinger of the future of fossil fuels, in which energy companies and power utilities retool for new greenhouse gas standards.
Though business executives generally oppose such controls, energy company planners here believe there may be opportunities in the financial balance sheet of global warming.
Even before all the scientific, safety and legal questions are settled, energy companies from Scotland to Southern California are gambling billions of dollars on the hope that they can meet growing demands for electricity with oil, gas and coal, and avoid the increasing financial penalties by burying the greenhouse gases they generate.
The work can be as dangerous and grueling as extracting oil.
