Conor here: In addition to increasing oil production as the next piece states, there are also major risks from the pipelines that carry the captured CO2 to where it is pumped back into the ground. From Bold Nebraska:
In the event of a burst or leak of a carbon pipe, a CO2 gas pipe may appear, which is odorless and colorless, an inhibitor that can absorb all living things, and prevent burning vehicles such as cars from starting so that they can escape to a safe place.
This is happening in 2020 in Satartia, Mississippi. Details from Huff Post:
It was after 7pm when residents of Satartia, Mississippi, began to smell rotten eggs. Then a green cloud rolled across Route 433 and landed in the valley around the town. Not many minutes later, the people were inside the cloud, panting and gasping in amazement.
About twenty people were defeated in a few minutes, and collapsed in their houses; at a fishing camp on the nearby Yazoo River; in their cars. Cars have recently shut down, as they need oxygen to burn fuel. The drivers crept out of their disabled cars, but they were so confused that they wandered around in the dark.
The first call to the Yazoo County Emergency Management Agency came in at 7:13 pm on February 22, 2020.
“DRIVER ADVISED OF A GOOD SMELL AND A GREEN CHICKEN ON THE HIGHWAY,” read the message that dispatchers sent to the cellphones and radios of all the county’s emergency responders two minutes later.
First responders gathered almost immediately, although they were not yet sure what the emergency was. Maybe it was a leak in one of the nearby natural gas pipes, or chlorine in the water tank.
However, the first thought was not the carbon dioxide pipeline that cuts through the hills above the city, a distance of less than half a mile. Denbury Inc, then known as Denbury Resources, operates a network of CO2 pipelines along the Gulf Coast that inject gas into oil fields to extract more oil. Although ambient CO2 is odorless, colorless and heavier than air, the industrial CO2 in the Denbury pipeline is compressed into a liquid, which is pumped through pipelines under high pressure. A rupture in this type of pipe sends CO2 out in a cloud of dense, white powder that sinks to the ground and cools enough to make the metal smooth enough to be smashed with a hammer.
By Geoff Dembicki, a weather reporter based in New York City. He is the author of The Petroleum Papers and Are We Screwed? Originally published at DeSmog.
Canada’s largest oil field in the province of Saskatchewan was about to reach the end of its life eight years ago. But thanks to carbon capture and storage, a technology widely touted by the oil and gas industry and other political leaders as a key solution to climate change, the sector could still produce 1.5 million barrels of oil a year by 2100.
That’s according to figures from Calgary-based senior geologist Menhwei Zhao, who wrote a paper about the findings in the February 2024 issue of the AAPG Bulletin, a journal published by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.
Although oil and gas producers since the 1970s have been capturing carbon dioxide from their operations and pumping it into depleted oil wells, a process known as “enhanced oil recovery,” few studies “show in detail how CO2 injection affects oil production and extends the life of oil reservoirs.” ,” Zhao wrote.
He analyzed more than 22 years of production data from the Weyburn Midale oil field, which since 2000 has received carbon dioxide injections. The world’s longest-running advanced oil recovery project using carbon capture and storage. Zhao concluded that “without CO2 injection the reservoir would have reached the end of its life in 2016,” but that “enhanced oil recovery could extend the life of the reservoir to 39 or 84 years more.”
These are the most pressing climate issues, according to David Schlissel of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a nonprofit research organization focused on the clean energy transition. “The fact that the oil field would have settled down,” he told DeSmog, “and now it could be over by the year 2100 is amazing and scary.”
Zhao said that while he is focusing on a specific project in Canada he can expect to see “similar results” of large carbon capture and storage projects around the world: decades of increased oil production from depleted fields – or “pools” as he puts it. to them – that would have to be closed.
Brazilian oil giant Petrobras put a record 10.6 million tons of CO2 underground by 2022 to extract more oil. Saudi Arabia has ambitious plans to boost oil production. And US companies like Occidental continue to expand expertise in oil-producing areas like the Permian Basin.
“The oil reservoirs are different – different geology, different quality,” Zhao told DeSmog about the technology’s global prospects. So the reaction to CO2 injection may be different. However, it should help oil production for sure. ” It’s a win for industry and the climate, he writes, because “most of the injected CO2 is permanently stored in old oil reservoirs.”
There is a lot of conflict between that between climate experts and energy, however. A DeSmog investigation of 12 major carbon capture projects around the world found “a series of missed carbon capture targets” as companies failed to properly bury the greenhouse gas or in some cases simply released it into the atmosphere.
Writing about advanced oil recovery earlier this year, Harvard University professor Naomi Oreskes noted that “every new barrel of oil and cubic foot of gas sold and burned puts more CO2 into the atmosphere. So not only do these types of projects help, but they further our use of fossil fuels at a critical time in history when we need to do the opposite. “
Major Community Grants
The AAPG Bulletin study comes as the Canadian and Albertan governments prepare to provide more than $15.3 billion in tax dollars to the country’s largest oil sands producers to build catch-and-storage projects. The UK government is promising a £20 billion subsidy and US oil and gas producers can get a tax credit of $85 per tonne of carbon dioxide they bury underground (the credit is reduced to $60 per tonne if the CO2 is used for development availability of oil).
Obviously these large public subsidies will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Biden administration said the “massive deployment” of carbon capture and storage technology is “critical to addressing the climate crisis.”
But most of the carbon dioxide emitted by the oil and gas industry is currently used to extract more oil. As DeSmog reported last year, 22 of the world’s 32 carbon capture facilities use captured CO2 to extend the life of aging oil wells.
The potential for enhanced oil recovery using captured carbon dioxide is huge. “Of the total of 600 billion barrels of oil that have been found in the United States, about 400 billion barrels cannot be found by conventional means. Half of that recoverable oil (200 billion barrels) is at a reasonable depth where [enhanced oil recovery] may work,” estimates the US Department of Energy.
‘Produce Oil and Gas Forever’
Oil and gas producers insist that even if carbon capture is used to produce oil it is still beneficial to the climate because the buried carbon reduces the climate impact of burning new oil. Using such technology, “there is no reason not to produce oil and gas forever,” Vicki Hollub, CEO of US company Occidental Petroleum, told NPR last year.
That argument rests on deeply flawed statistics, Schlissel’s statistics. He points to US government statistics showing that injecting a metric tonne of carbon dioxide into an aging oil well can produce three barrels of oil. Those three barrels, when burned, release about 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. “You’ve wiped out your savings on CO2 capture,” he said.
The main effect is to increase our dependence on oil and gas. When the Weyburn carbon capture project in Saskatchewan was first announced in 1997 it was promoted as a way to extend the life of an aging oil field by 25 years, and was later called a “temporary technology that will allow the world to meet climate change. challenges.”
More than a quarter century later, the Weyburn field is “still going strong,” according to Pipeline Online. “There are a billion barrels of oil left in this reservoir,” one expert told an industry publication in 2022.
Zhao’s latest calculations in the AAPG Bulletin suggest the project, and many others like it, could continue to produce oil long past the 2050 deadline scientists say is needed to achieve net-zero global emissions and avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
That shows experts like Charles Harvey, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies carbon capture and storage, that the huge amount of taxpayer dollars going to this technology under the pretense of reducing emissions from around the world is actually strengthening the energy at the heart of the climate problem.
“Subsidizing this tilts the field away from technologies that produce no CO2 to begin with,” he told DeSmog, such as truly low-carbon energy sources like wind and solar. “That’s how it leads to a big oil market.”
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