Canada’s carbon-for-oil program
For those who are interested, here’s a story I wrote in today’s Toronto Star about the Weyburn Project, which is an international study of EnCana Corp.’s use of carbon dioxide to extract hard-to-get oil from its 50-year-old Weyburn oil field in southeast Saskatchewan. The CO2 is being pumped in via a 200 mile pipeline from a coal gasification facility in North Dakota.
It’s a combination of enhanced oil recovery and carbon sequestration. On top of getting access to the oil, EnCana has apparently pumped 4.5 million tonnes of byproduct CO2 into the ground that would otherwise be released into the atomsphere. U.S. energy secretary Samuel Bodman is apparently hyped about the prospect of future EOR/sequestration efforts.
“The success of the Weyburn Project could have incredible implications for reducing CO2 emissions and increasing America’s oil production,” said Bodman in a statement from the U.S. Department of Energy. “Just by applying this technique to the oil fields of Western Canada we would see billions of additional barrels of oil and a reduction of CO2 emissions equivalent to pulling more than 200 million cars off the road for a year.”
Well, I guess it’s a lesser evil. It doesn’t do much for weaning us off fossil fuels, but it at least finds a place for storing a harmful greenhouse gas… assuming it stays there. I’m always suspicious of any effort where future generations could end up inheriting a problem that wasn’t a problem when we created it.
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
