(UPDATED*) San Antonio Express News: Doin’ it Texas Style, or … What’s wrong with this carbon sequestration picture?
Most reporters instinctively think, while writing stories, that they ought to try to answer questions that readers themselves might think up if they’d been the ones doing the reporting. It’s a good way to be sure to cover the obvious as well as the offbeat. The Tracker wondered about that while reading in the San Antonio Express-News Anton Caputo’s fairly detailed account, published late last week, of a carbon sequestration pilot test in the works for Texas’s Permian Basin. A big state utility plans to pump carbon captured at two new coal plants back into saline basins in the region. A market there already exists, Caputo writes, for CO2. Oil companies use the gas to enhance recovery of crude oil from formations where viscosity or other factors make it hard to pump out.
As test projects go this makes pretty good sense. An infrastructure already exists for sequestering CO2. But won’t readers inevitably wonder what the net change in fossil emissions is if one uses the CO2 just to get more fossil fuel to the surface — and then presumably to burn it as fuel and send yet more fossil carbon into the sky? Which is to say, what’s the point? It seems he ought at least to have brought the irony up in the story.
*UPDATE – (Thur Mar 6) – In light of comments below, writer Valerie Brown (modestly) let The Tracker know of some stories, including two of hers, that look deeply into – among other things – what happens to CO2 when pumped into deep formations. Hers are High Country News “A Climate Change Solution” on sequestration in basalt, and Environmental Health Perspectives “Of Two Minds” on the conflicts that can arise when sequestration and pollution issues collide ; and Environmental Health Perspectives “Carbon Capture & Storage – Blue-Sky Technology or Just Blowing Smoke?” by Charles W. Schmidt. Thx.
Loading ...
March 3rd, 2008 at 6:12 pm
It’s a fair question, but a bit biased and one that introduces a many more angles to the story. It implies sucking more oil out of the ground is a bad thing. We still need oil. The reporter’s goal might have been to simply is to explain how the sequestration system works. At least some CO2 goes into the ground! With oil at $104 a barrel, someone can afford to to get that oil out of the ground.
I suspect working in the oil patch does not invite much criticism about getting oil. That said, I don’t overly fault the reporter. Maybe an examination of the tradeoffs is Part II.
March 4th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
The other question I always want answered is if you put pressurized carbon dioxide into an underground reservoir, how do you make sure it stays there? I can imagine that people might have a solution figured out for reservoirs with just one route in/out – but what keeps CO2 inside a seam that’s been peppered with oil-well holes?
March 4th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Mr Powell – Not sure, but for one thing it takes pressure to get the CO2 down there. And once there, the pressure of the formation itself, weighed down by all that overlying crust, probably keeps it well-dissolved in the saline aquifers or wherever it resides. So it doesn’t bubble up easily. Oil well holes aren’t hollow anyway – they’re full of oil, or water or drilling mud or whatever, meaning they are not low pressure avenues of escape but are just plugs of material different from the native rock. One has to PUMP the oil up from most formations (gushers, like artesian wells, aren’t all that common).
March 4th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Hey – thanks for the clarification. Though if one reason the CO2 is being pumped down there is to coax more oil out of the ground, it must be being pumped at a pressure that is greater than ambient. Seems like that means the CO2 itself should be vulnerable to finding its own way out. Though I see what you mean, maybe the CO2 adds just enough pressure to make the pumps effective again.
March 6th, 2008 at 11:00 am
See UPDATE in main post for more links to several feature-length stories related to sequestration.
April 24th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
The question was asked. The Tenaska folks didn’t have a real good answer. It was something like, since oil is being pumped as fast as possible anyway they didn’t believe the addition of the oil gained in this project would add any co2 to the overall mix and might actually constitute a net benefit since this oil production has a sequestration component.
This answer, and the whole issue of the short-term environmental benefit of the project (as opposed to the long-term potential of sequestration), opened up a whole new can of worms. So, with a tight news hole, it was left out. Might be a debatable decision, but there you have it.