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The economics look sound, judging from a 2009 study by Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The study found that using enhanced oil recovery revenues could cover the entire price premium for carbon capture on coal-fired power, assuming oil fetches about $75 a barrel. Oil was selling above $74 on Friday.
Research also shows that oil-field operators can keep the carbon dioxide from escaping to the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide that returns to the surface when the oil is produced is readily separated from the oil and reinjected underground. A decade of monitoring has found no net losses of postindustrial carbon dioxide injected into oil fields near Weyburn, Saskatchewan.
The University of Texas is confirming those findings at the world's oldest and largest EOR operation: an oil field about a two-hour drive northeast of Penwell. Since 1972, a succession of owners have injected over 150 million tons of carbon dioxide into the oil-soaked fossilized reef, which lies 6,000 to 7,000 feet below Snyder, TX. The field is pierced by over 2,000 wells, but, according to Susan Hovorka, a senior geologist with the university's Gulf Coast Carbon Center in Austin, TX, three years of searching has yet to reveal a trace of leakage.
Hovorka points, for example, to aquifers that begin just 300 feet above the carbon dioxide, which is injected at 2,200 pounds per square inch. The water shows neither the elevated acidity or pressure that a leak should induce. "The wells are sealing better than we'd anticipated. It's cheering," says Hovorka.
Whether such sequestration represents a net carbon reduction remains, however, a matter of interpretation, since the oil produced will eventually be burned as fuel. A life cycle assessment from Carnegie Mellon University last fall estimated that, when fuel combustion is factored in, such enhanced oil operations release 3.7 to 4.7 tons of CO2 for every ton of CO2 sequestered. EOR operations would have to use three times as much CO2 per barrel of oil produced to completely offset their tailpipe emissions.
Hovorka expects just that to happen if and when carbon pricing becomes a reality. She says that under current conditions, EOR operators maximize the oil-to-CO2 ratio to minimize costs, but can adjust operations to flip the ratio if carbon pricing means there's value in offsetting emissions. "The carbon balance of EOR is market driven, not implicit in the technology," says Hovorka.
Miller says it is unfair to pin the downstream emissions on Summit, since the resulting oil is likely to displace other, less desirable oil production. "It's not realistic [to think] that we're not going to pull oil out of the ground. I'd rather go into existing wells rather than offshore and into environmentally sensitive places to dig for oil," she says.
An Alberta project will transform coal deep beneath the ground into gas.
The United States and China are both focusing on technologies to clean up coal power.
"Selling carbon dioxide to oil and gas operators should boost the Penwell plant's revenues by about 50 percent. Miller says those sales will cover one-third of the revenues Summit will need to service the [debt]". So the enhanced revenues (r+.5r = 1.5r) are just enough to service the debt (3*.5r)? When does the plant start to make money?
Also, there seems to be some double-accounting here. If the capturing of the CO2 from burning the coal is counted as making the coal plant carbon-neutral, you shouldn't also count it as offsetting the emissions from burning the EOR oil.
I had a look at the original paper (Life Cycle Inventory of CO2 in an Enhanced Oil Recovery System). The authors appear to taken great pains to avoid any double accounting of emissions reductions. LCA methodology is specifically designed to avoid this sort of thing. They discuss the need to define the scope of the system (all emissions-related activities that are impacted) and to allocate emissions/reductions to specific products produced within the system boundary. They consider two scenarios, allocating everything to: a) electricity; or b) oil. I haven't checked every step of their logic, but I would be surprised to find that they fell into any double accounting traps. On the other hand, they point out that the LCA, applied to a case such as this, requires making some significant assumptions about the type of emission-producing activity that would be displaced by the EOR system: "There is uncertainty as to what electricity generation or oil source would be displaced". The paper's final statement is: "It is clear, that without displacement of a carbon intensive energy source, the CO2-EOR systems will result in net carbon emissions". To me, that's like saying that investing in solar or wind power will lower emissions more than investing in a CO2-EOR system, but that the latter would be an improvement over conventional oil and electricity generation. Proponents of actual projects, if using LCA, will have to make assumptions about displaced energy sources and be prepared to justify them to various stakeholders.
It would hard to predict the revenues for this plant. If carbon gets priced/taxed, the cost of coal could go down, and the price of power could go up. On the other hand, the plant will be located near the biggest concentration of wind generation in the U.S., where power prices sometimes go negative. Carbon dioxide for EOR can be more easily produced from natural gas power plants, and supplies of gas seem to be growing rapidly. And I have no idea what urea prices might do. Good luck to them and to their investors.
Your political bias is showing.
You start off critical of the Texas governor for his stance on climate legislation. Then you spend the rest of the article arguing the benefits of this particular plan that is supported by the governor.
Grow up Tecnnology Review.
Whether the Gov supports or opposes climate legislation will be a matter of record. I dont know how that automatically becomes political bias.
Good stewardship <> Supporting GHG Mythology
so simple that it plumb evades them. reuse of a by-product is good business, as well as good stewardship. what does that have to do with the fact that the Governor of Texas is smart enough not to buy into mythology or base his decisions upon it?
As somebody who feels that the US government has a role to play in both securing a stable supply of energy and regulating the emission of pollution from power plants, this appears to be a win-win compromise. It's not perfect (because it leaves us dependent on non-renewable sources of fuel...both the coal and oil from the wells that use the CO2), but it seems like a win-win compromise. This is good for the US as far as energy security and somewhat good as far as lowering the rate of GHG emissions.
It's not perfect, but it seems like a good investment of the taxpayers money. (i.e. it'll grow the economy so that the government can collect its money back in the form of existing taxes.)
I'm guessing that the return on investment for this power plant in Texas is better than the power plant that is slated to be built in Illinois because the plant in Illinois is planning on just sequestering the CO2 under the ground.
Given the CO2 needs of the oil industry (because they are currently pulling CO2 out of ground in places like Utah and New Mexico), it seems like we should be supplying the oil industry with as much CO2 as possible so that they stop pulling CO2 out of the ground for their enhanced oil recovery.
These win-win situations are rare, but I think that we should go after them whenever we see them.
Correction to the article - the 'E' in NETL stands for ENERGY. There is no such thing as the National Environmental Technology Laboratory.
I find the term "clean coal", which was coined by the coal industry in order to mislead the public, offensive. Perhaps the tobacco industry can coin a new term as well--"clean cigarettes". There is no such thing as "clean coal"--it all pollutes. I won't even go into mountain-top removal which is a devasting method to get this so-called clean coal. How many lies are we supposed to take? We are just sitting back and letting industries like this pollute and destroy our ecosystems just so we can play on our computers and watch American Idol on the boob-tube. I know how many Appalachian mountains have been destroyed by these people, but here's a quiz--does anyone else here know?
Clean coal costs and inefficiencies will dwarf all other renewable energy programs. Federal funds are far better spent nuclear with fusion as a 20 year objective.
Relatively small quantities of heavy radioactive isotopes cannot be safely sequestered deep inside a mountain in the middle of a desert, yet we are told that millions of tons of high pressure gas can be safely sequestered in uncharted underground voids for millenia.
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MakeSense
99 Comments
Just another money grab
When the farmers want a market for corn, the government spends billions to subsidize ethanol. When the oil industry wants a market for hydrogen (a byproduct of its current means to produce CO2), the government spends billions to reseach and hype the "hydrogen economy". Now, the oil industry wants to secure CO2 from coal-fired power plants and needs billions of government bucks to do that. Of course, carbon sequestration is a pipe dream like the overstated potential of ethanol or the impossible dreams of a hydrogen economy.
These government decisions are ERRORS, meaning the results will not be anything meaningful or useful. We need to stop corporate control of our government and slam the coffers shut. Energy policy should not be made based on the greed of agriculture or the oil industry or ill-fated, cost-prohibitive attempts to sequester carbon dioxide.
Reply
jefferee
22 Comments
Re: Just another money grab
What statistics are you citing in your claim that government is spending billions to subsidize ethanol? I know the government is funding grants for startup ventures, but I wouldn't necessarily call that subsidizing. And, right now…today, I drive a flex fuel vehicle. Today, ethanol isn't quite on par economically with gasoline. However, this lack of parity is based a comparison of non-cellulosic ethanol to gasoline. The technology for producing cellulosic ethanol at prices competitive to or less than gasoline (yes, even figuring in the energy content ratio) is available now and will be scaled up to mass production levels within the next two years.
The government has chosen not to put all its eggs in one basket, which is probably a smart move.
Reply
R Sweeney
70 Comments
Re: Just another money grab
Rice University just released a study which indicates that federal subsidies for ethanol are $1.95/gallon.
http://www.rice.edu/nationalmedia/news2010-01-06-biofuels.shtml
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MakeSense
99 Comments
Re: Just another money grab
Ethanol is subsidized at 51 cents per gallonn. This subsidy had been as high as 54 cents in the past. That's a direct subsidy to ethanol producers. When cash subsidies to corn farmers, sudsidized water and several other government largess are factored in, the total subsidy is over a dollar a gallon.
Cellulosic ethanol is subsidized at $1.28 or so a gallon to the producers, plus other indirect subsidies. Cellulosic processes are no where near commercial readiness! There are only demonstration plants that are built with government bucks, and the producers' subsidy is needed to make their low output worthwhile. Even if all the biomass the country produces were used for cellulosic ethanol, it would only offset a few percent of our existing oil demand, which rises an average of 1.5% a year. Don't be fooled by politics and big agriculture. It's as bad a combination as politics and big oil.
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