The Oil Drum

The 7:30 report on the ABC had a segment yesterday on the impact of the Garnaut report on two Cooper basin projects - GeoDynamics' HFR geothermal power experiment (covered before in Geothermia) and Santos' proposal to use carbon dioxide injection into Cooper Basin oil and gas fields to enhance recovery rates - the Moomba Carbon Storage project (pdf).

GeoDynamics have also been in the news (The Australian) as it conducted flow tests over the weekend to determine if there is any pressure loss between the Habanero 1 and Habaenro 3 wells. The results are to be announced later this week. The company has also commenced drilling another test well, 9km from Habanero, to test the extent of hot granite rocks within the company's operating permits.

Preliminary data regarding oil production through December 2007 is now available from the US Energy Information Administration, so it is a good time to put together an updated summary of where we are now with respect to peak oil. The major themes of this presentation are

• The US oil story
• The world oil story
• Five myths

I have put this summary together in the format of a PowerPoint presentation plus notes. In this format, it is a multi-purpose document. You can

1. Read the post yourself, with or without my comments.

2. Use the presentation (PDF) as a handout, to give to one or two of your friends. My comments are intended to give you some more background, so you can better explain the presentation and answer questions.

3. Use the presentation for a group, using the PowerPoint format.

Looking at the ASPO Blog, I read these statements by some prominent members of the peak oil community.

[Robert] Hirsch doubts that the world can keep increasing oil flows for much longer. "CERA sees a long plateau ahead," he said. "But I can't find a plateau in the data I'm looking at." The downturn, when it comes, could take the world by surprise. "Peaking could come with little warning and sharp declines," he said....

"We have 1,500 days until peak and tomorrow we'll have one day less," Chris Skrebowski, the editor of Petroleum Review, told the ASPO-5 crowd today. Skrebowski's projections, which focus on oil flows instead of reserves, has the world peaking at between 92 and 94 million barrels per day. Unfortunately, he said, "collectively we're still in denial."

Hirsch is the principal author of the now famous Hirsch Report (large pdf). Skrebowski maintains the Megaprojects Database of future oil production. These quotes got me thinking about the shape of the peak in world oil production which Skrebowski projects as occurring in the fall of 2010.

Following Yankee's story about carbon dioxide injection, it appears that not everyone understands one of the ways in which carbon dioxide will help enhance oil recovery (EOR). I am therefore going to just list some of the previous posts that include carbon dioxide, which was discussed here, and here, not to mention here and here.

Below the fold, however, I am going to repeat, with a little update, the post where I described what carbon dioxide injection can do to an existing oil well, and that itself followed an earlier post. These were pre-cursors to what later became the weekend techie talks, and these really relate to those, and from now on I will include this post in that listing. Since the topic largely relates to oilwell production, the listing this week will be for those sites. For those new to the site, on most weekends (though not next week) I will post a simplified explanation of one aspect of fossil energy extraction. So far we have been covering coal this year, after covering aspects of oil and gas production last year.

Carbon dioxide injection is a current DOE program for enhancing oil recovery from an older oil reservoir that has already produced the bulk of the primary oil that it will yield. Just recently Glencoe have started injection in central Alberta, and though the OGJ article on this is behind their wall, a short quote:

Glencoe Resources Ltd., private Calgary independent, is using the gas to improve recovery of primarily light oil from multiple formations in several depleted oil fields about 100 miles north-northeast of Calgary.

The company hopes to boost the recovery factor to as high as 40% from 10-20%. All of the formations are deeper than 1,300 m.

Glencoe has long-term agreements to purchase CO2 from two industrial plants. It operates about 50 miles of CO2 pipelines and has begun injecting gas from the MEGlobal Canada Inc. plant at Prentiss. A second CO2 separation facility being built near the NOVA Chemicals Corp. petrochemical plant is to go into service in early 2006.

The original post related to cleaning up after elephants*, and was written during the time when I frequently compared Saudi Arabia to a sandwich shop (sorry but no-one every noticed the pun!)

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.