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.
November 18th, 2005 at 9:04 am
tyler–
glad you cover it, especially because you don’t gloss over the pitfalls. the fact that you admit is a lesser of two evils: great stuff! Personally i am much more into taking that CO2 and using it properly, rather than sequestering it, or using it to pump out more oil…. (but what can you do?)
At least the NREL down there has shown that you can suck up 90% of that CO2 and turn it into biodiesel -producing algae (and actually compost 1/2 and then burn the other 1/2) or even now hydrogen producing algaes…. i mean you gotta admit that that is btter than shoving it down there liek you say as a present for our grandkids….
one question though– why is it that we can have carbon scrubbers on submarines but not for sciety? is it scale (because there are economies of scale too, right?) is itjust that we don’t know what todo with all that carbon if we suck it out of the air? (me, i’d make diamond tools!!!)
keep up the great work Tyler, you’re the most important newspaper journalist we have in this country!
your fan,
lee
November 18th, 2005 at 9:10 am
srry forgot the links:
about the Biodiesel Algae (pdf)
about the Hydrogen Algae (pdf)
kind regards,
lee