Can Pumping CO2 Into California's Oil Fields Help Stop Global Warming? (yahoo.com) 83
America's Environmental Protection Agency "has signed off on a California oil company's plans to permanently store carbon emissions deep underground to combat global warming," reports the Los Angeles Times:
California Resources Corp., the state's largest oil and gas company, applied for permission to send 1.46 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year into the Elk Hills oil field, a depleted oil reservoir about 25 miles outside of downtown Bakersfield. The emissions would be collected from several industrial sources nearby, compressed into a liquid-like state and injected into porous rock more than one mile underground.
Although this technique has never been performed on a large scale in California, the state's climate plan calls for these operations to be widely deployed across the Central Valley to reduce carbon emissions from industrial facilities. The EPA issued a draft permit for the California Resources Corp. project, which is poised to be finalized in March following public comments. As California transitions away from oil production, a new business model for fossil fuel companies has emerged: carbon management. Oil companies have heavily invested in transforming their vast network of exhausted oil reservoirs into a long-term storage sites for planet-warming gases, including California Resources Corp., the largest nongovernmental owner of mineral rights in California...
[Environmentalists] say that the transportation and injection of CO2 — an asphyxiating gas that displaces oxygen — could lead to dangerous leaks. Nationwide, there have been at least 25 carbon dioxide pipeline leaks between 2002 and 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Perhaps the most notable incident occurred in Satartia, Miss., in 2020 when a CO2 pipeline ruptured following heavy rains. The leak led to the hospitalization of 45 people and the evacuation of 200 residents... Under the EPA draft permit, California Resources Corp. must take a number of steps to mitigate these risks. The company must plug 157 wells to ensure the CO2 remains underground, monitor the injection site for leaks and obtain a $33-million insurance policy.
Canadian-based Brookfield Corporation also invested $500 million, according to the article, with California Resources Corp. seeking permits for five projects — more than any company in the nation. "It's kind of reversing the role, if you will," says their chief sustainability officer. "Instead of taking oil and gas out, we're putting carbon in."
Meanwhile, there's applications for "about a dozen" more projects in California's Central Valley that could store millions of tons of carbon emissions in old oil and gas fields — and California Resources Corp says greater Los Angeles is also "being evaluated" as a potential storage site.
Although this technique has never been performed on a large scale in California, the state's climate plan calls for these operations to be widely deployed across the Central Valley to reduce carbon emissions from industrial facilities. The EPA issued a draft permit for the California Resources Corp. project, which is poised to be finalized in March following public comments. As California transitions away from oil production, a new business model for fossil fuel companies has emerged: carbon management. Oil companies have heavily invested in transforming their vast network of exhausted oil reservoirs into a long-term storage sites for planet-warming gases, including California Resources Corp., the largest nongovernmental owner of mineral rights in California...
[Environmentalists] say that the transportation and injection of CO2 — an asphyxiating gas that displaces oxygen — could lead to dangerous leaks. Nationwide, there have been at least 25 carbon dioxide pipeline leaks between 2002 and 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Perhaps the most notable incident occurred in Satartia, Miss., in 2020 when a CO2 pipeline ruptured following heavy rains. The leak led to the hospitalization of 45 people and the evacuation of 200 residents... Under the EPA draft permit, California Resources Corp. must take a number of steps to mitigate these risks. The company must plug 157 wells to ensure the CO2 remains underground, monitor the injection site for leaks and obtain a $33-million insurance policy.
Canadian-based Brookfield Corporation also invested $500 million, according to the article, with California Resources Corp. seeking permits for five projects — more than any company in the nation. "It's kind of reversing the role, if you will," says their chief sustainability officer. "Instead of taking oil and gas out, we're putting carbon in."
Meanwhile, there's applications for "about a dozen" more projects in California's Central Valley that could store millions of tons of carbon emissions in old oil and gas fields — and California Resources Corp says greater Los Angeles is also "being evaluated" as a potential storage site.
No (Score:2, Insightful)
Betteridge's law (of headlines) is an adage that states "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." The sweeping generalization refers to the poor journalistic practice of writing sensational headlines in the form of a question in order to compensate for the author's lack of facts.
https://www.techtarget.com/wha... [techtarget.com]
Oh yeah, great idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Store millions of tons of liquid CO2 underground in an quake zone, and the next time the ground fractures, you get something like Lake Nyos [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes because depleted oil fields are well known as being geologically unstable and incapable of holding such a material. /s
Re:Oh yeah, great idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes because depleted oil fields are well known as being geologically unstable and incapable of holding such a material. /s
Would that be before or after they've been fracked to hell by oil companies?
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Would that be before or after they've been fracked to hell by oil companies?
Not at all, oil fields are oil fields, they don't need to be fracked. We give a different name to reservoirs which rely on fracking for recovery and precisely zero of these have ever been proposed to store CO2.
Re:Oh yeah, great idea (Score:4, Informative)
https://earthquaketrack.com/us-ca-bakersfield/recent [earthquaketrack.com]
It's amusing that you think that the area around Bakersfield is even remotely close to being geologically stable.
Re:Oh yeah, great idea (Score:4, Insightful)
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I mean just saying it doesn't make it so. Just how much of California is suddenly awash with oil spurting out of the ground because of earthquakes? You can waste time looking it up but the answer is actually zero.
The oil industry has been injecting gas into wells for decades. It's called enhanced oil recovery. The geological formations of oil wells are incredibly stable even in earthquake zones. The only thing different here is that they are using dense phase CO2.
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You mean the one where the company ripped through the geological structure due to not having a clue how to drill for oil back a century ago? That one? The one that was a failed well from the onset due to how humans were tapping it? The one that predates every form of modern oil and gas drilling? Is that the one you're talking about?
Yeah thanks for confirming you are in fact completely clueless as to how any of this works.
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You mean the one where the company ripped through the geological structure due to not having a clue how to drill for oil back a century ago?
No, I dont. Sounds like the one you are talking about is _also_ longer than your lifetime.
Dont ask "gotcha" questions when your "gotcha" is wrong and way out in left field, out there giving _another_ datapoint that refutes you.
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Not all of CA is an earthquake zone
Sure, you've got the Klamath Knot...
The Central Valley has no no known faults
It's bordered by faults, literally, and one of those is the San Andreas, which you may have heard of.
Every part of California is a quake zone, either with a fault running through it, or a massive fault running next to it.
Re:Oh yeah, great idea (Score:5, Interesting)
If the natural gas, a much less dense gas, in gas fields in that area stay stable underground during earthquakes, what makes you think the CO2 wouldn't stay underground too?
Re:Oh yeah, great idea (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed. Methane is also much more geologically mobile, yet remained in the ground for millions of years.
The CO2 is injected as a super-critical fluid, not a gas, and it reacts with the surrounding rock to form carbonates.
There are concerns about the pipelines leaking, but once the CO2 is in the ground, it stays there.
This project is the first big one for California, but Texas and Oklahoma have been doing CO2 injections for years.
Enhanced oil recovery [wikipedia.org]
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They do not care about climate change, safety or really anything besides money.
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They do not care about climate change, safety or really anything besides money.
Then find ways to make reducing CO2 emissions profitable.
About a dozen or so?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:About a dozen or so?? (Score:5, Insightful)
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reduced profits
Stop, I can barely breathe I'm laughing so hard.
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I had the same reaction without knowing about the incident you sited. Whenever a company promises to indefinitely monitor something it that doesn't generate a stream of revenue to pay for it is a false promise. The company has to get its revenue to pay for the monitoring from somewhere and that means either higher prices or reduced profits for its ongoing operations.
I'm sure somebody more manipulative and with less attachment to their soul will be happy to investigate using the carbon credit system to make this a forever revenue stream. Perhaps the United States Government could supply a renter's fee, most likely to the tune of millions or billions per fiscal quarter, to keep this CO2 in the ground?
It's greenwashing (Score:5, Insightful)
So they're going to shift gears and start doing pointless and idiotic carbon capture nonsense to make it look like we don't need to make any changes to our power supply or how we use energy.
It'll work. Older voters still very much dominate voting and they are extremely opposed to even the most minimal or modest lifestyle changes.
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What? That golf course uses water regardless of whether people in the community conserve water or not so all of the water they saved by reducing usage was indeed saved.
Find something that actually works, and isn't a tool for class warfare.
From your post you seem less interested in things that work and more on being negative about the whole issue.
Re:It's greenwashing (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah yes, reducing usage has to be some extreme scenario, it can't be just people driving sensible vehicles and the like which would go a long way to reducing emissions and give us more time to roll out better, greener tech.
Give me a break with your fear mongering.
The way I look at it is this (Score:2)
And when I think about how expensive a car really is when you take away all the externalized costs I wonder
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The problem with what you're laying out there though is that other country's mass transit solutions like rail are completely impractical to implement in the US now due to cost. Europe's rail networks were developed over the course of a couple of centuries with rail lines built into newly developing city centers during periods of time with massively lower population density. To go through the entire US now and try to get rail to every or even most city centers is just not financially doable let alone legally
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Ugh, "due to our own bad...."
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Ah yes, reducing usage has to be some extreme scenario...
Yes, it has to be to meet your stated goals of CO2 emissions. By pretending otherwise you are either: a) lying about your goals, b) lying about necessary reduction in quality of life that is required to meet your goals. You can't get to Net Zero and have anything resembling Western lifestyle. So which part are you lying about?
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So which part are you lying about?
Probably the part where I explain a completely different path with the rest of my post. You know, the part you omitted with your quote and ignored with your response. I was probably totally lying there. Good catch.
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https://cz.boell.org/en/2023/0... [boell.org]
Let's not forget that its mostly not our lifestyles causing the worst of the damage. Even if we all went 100% green, that is only ~30% of CO2 emissions in the WORLD, not a drop in t
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Yeah but that's because we didn't sit inside (Score:2)
One thing I did see and you can find articles online about this is that the cities air quality shot through the roof bring that couple of weeks when people weren't driving. It's f
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To the point where Soviet lifestyle will look like a life of luxury by comparison
maybe/maybe not. But without lifestyle changes, at best you are looking at a Mad Max Scenario. At worse the complete end of our civilization.
Re: It's greenwashing (Score:2)
Doing nothing and waiting a 100 years will also reduce everyone's quality of life. There has to be a middle ground where we're not screwed and our great grandchildren are not screwed.
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One of the best ways to reduce energy consumption is to mandate better insulated housing which improves the comfort of the occupants. We spend an insane amount of energy and money to heat and cool the glorified cardboard boxes we live in in America. (Incidentally, the soviet union was stupidly wasteful with its fossil fuels as well, so by your standards it must've indeed been the height of luxury)
Yay Capitalism! (Score:3, Informative)
Profiting from the solution to a problem we profited from causing. I love capitalism.
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According to the article they'll get an $85/ton federal tax credit which is basically hard cash to the bottom line. Plus if they can get some other business to pay them to bury that company's co2 they'll charge for it but it doesn't sound like they have any customers lined up.
By the math, this pays itself off in about 4-5 years to cover the $500m initial investment. All of it tax dollars. After year 5 it's pure free money.
It won't have any impact on the environment, no one has actually asked them to prov
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On the end of the day, you have to remember where the money comes from.
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You expect someone to work for free? I mean for years you demanded oil and gas, and now you're suggesting that providing you with what you wanted was bad for the world so you deserve a handout?
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You expect someone to work for free?
When you think only 140 characters at a time, that is the result you get.
Re:Yay Capitalism! (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfettered Capitalism is and always was about transferring the money of the clueless masses into the pockets of the already far too rich. Carefully controlled capitalism makes sure nobody gets too rich and hence has some merit and some longer-term stability. But the rich do not want that one.
"chief sustainability officer" (Score:1)
Earthquakes (Score:2)
What happens when you shake a carbonated drink bottle?
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What happens when you shake a carbonated drink bottle?
What happens when you shake liquid CO2 that is a kilometer underground at 10 megapascals in porous rock?
Answer: Nothing.
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underground at 10 megapascals
Unit does not compute. Can you provide this in a correct unit, such as Olympic Swimming Pools?
Re: Earthquakes (Score:1)
About 339 Olympic Swimming Pool.
Re: Earthquakes (Score:1)
If you take a depth of 5.736 Mayan's cubit or 5.555 Biblical cubit for clarity (or 6.25 or 5.208 depending on which rabbi you trust).
a resounding NO (Score:3, Insightful)
No, of course not. 50 billion tons of CO2 is added to the atmosphere by human activity per year, they won't pump even a 1000 of 1 percent into it.
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Yeah, that reminds me of the first person to refine petroleum into gasoline/benzine as an energy source for an engine.
Naysayer, "You think that stuff can power engines that will replace horses? Do you know how many horses there are?"
Yeah, the pilot program is just a drop in the ocean so why even try something new? Using your numbers they would have to do this 100,000 times. Luckily there are over 5 million oil wells in the world so there are plenty to evaluate as suitable geography.
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Are you a Hyperloop fan?
Looks like scam for me...CO2 will not stay there.. (Score:2)
I seriously doubt this CO2 will stay there long...
Quakes, ground movements, gaps in sealing ...
The only acceptable CO2 removal for me is artificial fuel and biomass..
less than 2 million metric ton per year (Score:3)
Depends on how much, and where (Score:2, Funny)
If you pump enough CO2 into the area where people are working and thus nobody can work anymore without dying...
TIFTFY (Score:2)
"It's keeping to the same old PR green-washing role, if you will," says their chief sustainability officer. "As well as taking oil and gas out to generate billions of tonnes of CO2, we're also putting a little bit of that carbon in."
T,IFTFY.
greenwashing (Score:4, Insightful)
In the oil industry it's called "Enhanced Oil Recovery" or EOR. They don't do it to be "green," they do it because injecting CO2 into an oil well allows more oil to be extracted: https://www.energy.gov/sites/d... [energy.gov]
So it does fuck-all for the climate, and the end result is more fossil fuels for burning. If this sort of behaviour gets a government handout, it's time to change the laws.
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Was going to say this, but it is typically alternated with water / waste-water, so the loss of water is also an issue. You just have to be very careful to not pump so much that you damage the formation itself.
Energy crime (Score:2)
You burn oil to release energy. Stable hydrocarbons are consumed.
It takes energy to scrub CO2 and produce unstable liquid/gas.
This is a complete waste of energy. Every gallon "reclaimed" is a gallon wasted.
Better: improve efficiency, find alternative fuels, save taxpayer dollars
The answer is, no of course it cannot! (Score:3)
Can Pumping CO2 Into California's Oil Fields Help Stop Global Warming?
No. Because too little will be removed from the atmosphere as a result to have any effect at all on Global Warming. Or anything else.
People are always wanting to do things 'because climate' without stating what the effects on the climate will be. In the current case there are about 37 billion tons a year, and rising, of global emissions.
How much are they going to pump into the oil fields? The answer should be in tons/year.
As usual, no-one is saying. Tells you all you need to know.
Haha. (Score:2)
Good one. They are going to STOP global warming! Just by pumping some air underground. They will STOP it, I tell you, stop it.
Here's a way better idea: BioChar (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Biochar is the lightweight black residue, made of carbon and ashes, remaining after the pyrolysis of biomass, and is a form of charcoal.[1] Biochar is defined by the International Biochar Initiative as "the solid material obtained from the thermochemical conversion of biomass in an oxygen-limited environment".[2] Biochar is a stable solid that is rich in pyrogenic carbon and can endure in soil for thousands of years.[3]
You don't "burn" wood, you burn whatever waste wood like
Plant Trees - Shut of Lights When You Leave Room (Score:2)
Epic fail in⦠(Score:2)
25 years down the road.... (Score:1)
Why is this even being talked about? (Score:2)
Who would anyone voluntarily pay to do this? Only people who then use it to offset production of CO2 somewhere with the bullshit offset schemes (scams). Then they have effectively pushed the liability into the future. If it breaks then, do they care? Of course not, they've taken advantage of all of the offsets. And likely also have done all of the company manipulation so that there doesn't even exist a company by then that could be held liable.
solid carbon is easier to store (Score:1)
There is lots of unwanted carbon in a solid state: most waste, ag waste, clearing for fire prevention. We let it or encourage it to turn into CO2. I struggle to believe that hoping to bury CO2 is a better option than compacting and storing that solid stuff. Cheaper energy is coming. We don't need to store carbon for long periods. Let's kick the can down the road, not try to solve everything now when we don't have the right energy technology.
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We could pyrolyze it, and fill old coal mines with it. The cycle could be complete.
Better to put biochar into agricultural fields, where it will soak up water and fertilizer and sequester carbon for 1000 years. Get rid of waste, improve soil and reduce runoff.