Quote:
Originally Posted by SeeGeeWhy
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. |
Yes, the oil produced does creat more CO2, but that is oil that would not have been recovered from this field, and would have been made up for by burning oil from another source.
So does this mean overall that more C02 will be left in the atmosphere?
If you assume that we'll get off of the oil bandwagon before it runs out then overall consumption is the same, and any extra oil produced from this field can be assumed to be left in the gournd somewhere else, and we come out ahead by putting this C02 in the ground.
However if you assume we'll keep buring oil untill every last drop is recovred, and that miscible C02 floods allow for greater revocery, then yes it does mean an increase in C02, becasue overall more Oil would have been burned and more C02 relesed into the atmosphere.
As it is now, putting the C02 in the ground reduces overall emissions becasue our Oil consumption doesn't increase due to the extra oil flowing from this field, so we can say that the C02 going into the ground counts as a Net decrease in the ammount of C02 emmissions.