The Oil Drum

The New York Times business section has an article that starts with the following paragraph:

Subsidiaries of BP and Edison International said yesterday that they were planning to build a power plant that would run on oil residues, and that 90 percent of the carbon dioxide would be captured and pumped into an oil field, where it would help push more oil to the surface.

According to the article, the gasification process that will be used in the California plant is said to be similar to what Bush talked about in the SotU when he mentioned "zero-emission coal-fired plants".

Tip of the hat to Engineer Poet for introducing me to this interesting and important story.

Recently, a little publicized meeting called the EOR Carbon Management Workshop, was held at the Petroleum Museum in Midland, Texas.

Michael Moore, director of the workshop, noted that the developing technology of capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, sequestering them geologically or utilizing those emissions in enhanced oil recovery has received government approval.

Holding up a recent announcement from U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman about the successful sequestration of 5 million tons of CO2 into the Weyburn field in Saskatchewan, Canada, he declared, "the government says it works!"

The Weyburn Project, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, captured CO2 from a coal gasification project in North Dakota and transported it over 200 miles to the Weyburn field for sequestration and enhanced oil recovery. The DOE estimated the field's oil recovery rate was doubled and, if the methodology was applied worldwide, would eliminate a third to a half of CO2 emissions over the next 100 years while helping recover billions more barrels of crude oil.

In this post, we'll examine the claims about Weyburn's success to cover two important related subjects.

1. CO2 injection for EOR (enhanced oil recovery)
2. CO2 sequestration as a solution to climate change

What did Weyburn actually demonstrate? What is the longer term meaning of the Weyburn project? Let's take a look.