By Michael J. Economides
About two years ago, on February 20, 2010, in the Wyoming Tribune and under the title “CO2 sequestration isn’t practical” I offered to “save the state of Wyoming from wasting $45 million.”
Well, a recent story in the Wyoming Tribune was headlined “Wyoming CO2 storage project may get put on hold”. The reason? “…while the project is based on the idea that CO2 is a byproduct and a pollutant due for stricter federal rules, CO2 is actually in demand in Wyoming, where oil producers pump it underground to force out hard-to-get oil, a method known as enhanced oil recovery…. That means the sequestration project researchers’ plan to buy 3 million tons of CO2 for testing came with a big price tag: $750 million.“
The cost, as usual, was of course always the elephant in the room. But in my original article I had suggested an easier way out. I wrote then: “Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) has been the great hope of middle-of-the-road characters, people other than radical “greenies” or their “right-wing” adversaries. Coal and some oil companies and several world governments have jumped on this and it has figured prominently in many energy and climate scenarios by think-tanks and universities. In some ways it has acted as an “indulgence” certificate. The logic goes that no matter what one’s position is on anthropogenic global warming (whose science is suffering a slow and painful-to-watch death), we have a way to paper over the debate. Engineers, and in particular, petroleum engineers, the ones accused of destroying the planet by the products, have a solution. Let’s literally bury the problem by re-injecting the offending gas back into the ground. Targets can be old oil and gas reservoirs but, more mentioned, are deep saline aquifers of which there are plenty.
Several coal companies and even oil companies tout CCS and some petroleum engineers, who ought to know better had they done simple calculations, have jumped on the bandwagon. The stakes are high and the rewards for those that promote the idea are lucrative. As the Wyoming proposal shows there is government and even company money for this. As usual, some researchers, instead of studying the very feasibility of the process, already taken for granted in some circles, have started working on peripheral aspects, such as solubility of CO2 in water and even mineralization, things that take tens to hundreds of thousands of years to mature.
On February 23, 2010 Ronald Surdam, the Wyoming state geologist and current Director of the Carbon Management Institute at the University of Wyoming, wrote a rebuttal to my piece titled “CO2 sequestration is essential to Wyo” and he firmly rejected my arguments in my OpEd and an earlier peer-reviewed technical paper.
He wrote (emphasis, mine): “In brief, Wyoming has done its homework, for we have read his paper and many others and have spent thousands of hours working on carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) in the last five years. I suggest that Economides should have done his homework before erroneously claiming that Wyoming’s effort in CCS is a major exercise in futility. Then he would know that the Wyoming Carbon Underground Storage Project (WY-CUSP) is based in part on an open fluid flow system.”
Apart from the preposterousness of the claim on how feasible this project was and that he did his homework, the amazing statement above and one that made me certain that they did not know what they were talking about was actually the last sentence: that the injection would be in an “open fluid system”. In other words this would not be a sequestration process. An open system is antithetical to storage.
Carbon capture and sequestration is dying an ignominious death because it makes no physical sense. The frequent deliberate confusion with using CO2 for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) has two huge flaws. First, injection for EOR is a “steady-state” process not storage and consequently, injectivity is far higher. I have no problem with CO2 injection for EOR or as an additive to hydraulic fracturing, procedures done routinely in the industry. The second and by far the biggest problem is that our calculations suggest that one year’s worth of CO2 emitted in the United States above what the Kyoto Protocol mandates is plenty enough for all the CO2 needed for EOR for the entire life not just for oil reservoirs now on line but for a generous 20 percent of ultimate US oil recovery. CO2 that needs to be managed dwarfs any EOR potential applications. And yet, for now CCS projects have to compete with CO2 that is in short supply and very expensive for ongoing oil EOR projects. Mind-boggling.
The Wyoming news comes at the heels of the Longannet fiasco in Scotland. Generating 2.4 gigawatts of electricity for 2 million homes, Longannet is the UK’s second-largest coal-fired power plant and the third largest in Europe. Situated on the north bank of the Firth of Forth on the Scottish east coast, the Longannet site is superbly placed to take full advantage of Britain’s existing North Sea energy infrastructure, especially pipelines to aid with CO2 transport and storage. The consortium due to construct the facility, Scottish Power, the National Grid and Shell UK, planned to pipe two million tonnes of CO2 – one-sixth of the plant’s carbon dioxide output – along the coast to St Fergus where, after compression into liquid form, it would be pumped for sequestration offshore in Shell’s Goldeneye gas field. Goldeneye could, it was claimed, store up to 30 million tonnes of CO2 beneath the North Sea.
In early October, however, as the Scottish Power consortium sought more state aid for Longannet, the resulting wrangle led to the project collapsing entirely. While the British Government is insisting that the £1 billion ($1.6bn) awarded to the Longannet CCS facility remains on the table for other potential projects, the reverberations for Longannet’s failure will be felt well beyond British shores.
As I said in my October 2010 piece in the Wyoming Tribune, “there is no need to research this subject any longer. Let’s try something else.”
Michael Economides is Editor-in-Chief of the Energy Tribune
For over 35 years, Wyoming Casing Service has been providing crews and equipment to meet the needs of oil and gas customers in the Rocky Mountain region.
First, injection for EOR is a “steady-state” process not storage and consequently, injectivity is far higher. I have no problem with CO2 injection for EOR or as an additive to hydraulic fracturing, procedures done routinely in the industry…
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I don’t understand the first part of his argument. It may be steady-state in a pressure sense (CO2 maintains reservoir pressure and displaces hydrocarbons). But not in a mass balance sense and certainly not in a composition sense. Even though perhaps half of the CO2 exits with the hydrocarbons, it too is captured and re-injected, along with “new” CO2. Bottom line: As time progresses, there will be increasingly more CO2 and less hydrocarbons in the reservoir.
If we accept that the source combustion will occur anyway, whether we sequester its CO2 or not, and that the EOR will also occur, regardless of where they get their CO2…the net amount entering the atmosphere will be less if some is recovered from combustion than by drilling for additional CO2 that nature already sequestered for us long ago.
Of course, if it isn’t cost effective to recover & transport the CO2 to EOR sites, that’s a real problem.