Saudi Arabia, the globe's largest crude producer, plans to inject carbon dioxide into the world's bigest oil field by 2013 to trap the climate-warming gas and improve production, said the kingdom's assistant petroleum minister.

'It gives me great pleasure to announce that the Ministry of Petroleum of Saudi Arabia and Saudi Aramco are working on a demonstration project for CO2 enhanced oil recovery (EOR),' Prince Abdulaziz Bin Salman Al-Saud told energy ministers at a carbon capture and storage summit in London on Tuesday.

'A CO2 EOR demonstration project is planned for implementation by 2013. It is planned to inject 40 million standard cubic feet per day of CO2 in an area already flooded by water in the great reservoir of Ghawar.'

He said Saudi Arabia did not need to produce oil through EOR but that it was planning to do it as part of the global push to trap carbon emissions under ground in an effort to limit the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

Discovered in 1948 Ghawar is the world's largest oilfield, with an output of around 5 million barrels per day in 2008, about half of Saudi oil production.-Reuters