The company I work for is a working interest partner in the Weyburn CO2 flood and is running a CO2 pilot on one of our properties in Central Alberta. Ever since coming onto the company I thought that miscible flooding would begin to emerge as a lever that would crack open the CO2 commodity market, and give a real benchmark for taxation of emissions. Also, it does work.
HOWEVER, for every reservoir barrel equivalent of CO2 that you place into the reservoir in order to recover an extra barrel of oil that will eventually be used as fuel (i.e. combustion), you will be releasing a net volume about 3 times greater than you "stored" by running the flood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_flooding
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhance...t_EOR_projects
"Examples of current EOR projects
In Canada, a CO2-EOR project has been established by
EnCana at the Weyburn Oil Field in southern
Saskatchewan. The project is expected to inject a net 18 million ton CO2 and recover an additional 130,000,000 barrels (21,000,000 m³) of oil, extending the life of the oil field by 25 years
[1]. When combusted, this extra volume of oil will produce nearly 60 million ton CO2, so in this case
carbon capture and storage in combination with EOR leads to more CO2 emissions than without injection of CO2. Since CO2 injection began in late 2000, the EOR project has performed largely as predicted. Currently, some 1600 m3 (10,063 barrels) per day of incremental oil is being produced from the field."
The oil & gas indsutry (and thus Alberta) will benefit from this technology, and people might buy this as a way we're doing things better, but it is not true. The fact remains that as long as we are reliant on fossil fuels for energy, we will not be reducing CO2 in the atmosphere.