Using Smokestack Gases to Pump Oil

The Wall Street Journal. ^ | February 8, 2010 | Ann Davis

[alloysteel]

Carbon dioxide pouring from smokestacks hardly has a reputation as a valuable commodity. But one company has launched a series of projects to see if it can use the refuse of the industrial economy to breathe new life into tired oil fields.

How well Denbury Resources Inc.'s projects go will be closely watched not just by environmentalists but other oil producers. For decades, companies have pumped naturally-occurring carbon dioxide from geological basins into existing oil wells. The gas acts like a solvent for the oil, removing it from rock formations.

[alloysteel]

This is developing technology, that both helps in meeting the demands for more energy being pumped from our own resorces, and quieting the critics of "excess" carbon dioxide generation. CO2 is an important industrial chemical, one that is woefully underutilized, and even if we do not fully understand the chemistry involved, this injected CO2 may be a strong factor in formation of NEW supplies of petroleum.

[optiguy]

http://www.heatingoil.com/blog/hydrofracking-regulation-would-kill-exxons-xto-acquisition1217/

[screaminsunshine]

It used to be a lot warmer here in Florida when we had Smudge Pots for the Orange Groves and Coal Power Plants Belching out CO2. Bring em back and Muscle Cars I am freezin my ass off.

[ruiner]

This technology is a win-win. Basically you take this CO2, which normally is vented, and inject it into oil fields to recover oil supplies which otherwise couldn’t be tapped. Best part is that it is all domestic oil.

[Tarpon]

LOL ... It’s uncanny how the federal government gets in front of every new development and destroys it before it has a chance. You would think the federal government is becoming anti-American.

What’s that sermon that Rev Wright gave about chickens and roosting. Of course he had to be referring to ignorant Kenyans, because Americans would never tolerate his racism.

[nuke rocketeer]

This is old technology. In 1979 in my first year as an engineer for Texas Electric at the Morgan Creek Power plant in Colorado City TX, an oil company approached us about a project for separating CO2 from the stack gasses on unit 6 there. Due to the high price for CO2, they wanted to build the separating equipment and pump it to a local oil field for tertiary recovery projects.

I did the preliminary work for my first big project. By 1980 we had finalized plans and we were getting ready to let out a proposal bid. Right before we did that, another oil company hit a huge natural gas strike either in Oklahoma or the had that had a very high percentage of CO2. They were going to separate the CO2 anyway before they shipped out the gas, and made an offer to the oil company that was much less than the cost of what we could supply.

Needless to say, the projrct died.

[Young Werther]

This plant in Beulah North Dakota began operations in 1984! The CO2 is piped to Canada where it is pumped into the Canadian Oil field to produce oil. As their processes have improved their extra products have been produced. Ammonia is sold to fertilizer companies, helium is sold to helium vendors for baloons and scuba divers, and Pepsi and Coke who buy the CO2 for consumption with the proviso that the bottling plants put the following on the label, "No Farting or Burping!"

This techology was received at the end of WWII from the NAZIs who converted their coal into gasoline, AVGas, diesel fuel, and natural gas so as to feed their war machines!

I guess someone needs to tell the Times that The Davey Crockett died at the Alamo, The North won the war, Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders saved the day in Cuba and the Titanic hit an iceberg!

[alloysteel]

There is a new edge to using this process, and that is the actual formation of NEW petroleum, using CO2 compressed to supercritical pressures (it becomes a liquid), then reacting with the water already in the rock formations, and in the presence of extreme heat (at which point the water present is also supercritical liquid), a sort of Fischer-Tropsch reaction takes place, as the carbon dioxide becomes carbon monoxide, at the very high temperatures encountered.

This is abiotic formation, and apparently goes on all the time at the Mohorovičić discontinuity, usually referred to as the Moho, which is the boundary between the Earth's crust and the mantle.

And all this time you thought petroleum was dinosaur soup.

[proud_yank]

this injected CO2 may be a strong factor in formation of NEW supplies of petroleum.

Not so much accessing new oil reserves, as getting greater oil recovery from existing reserves. An oil reservoir is not an open 'hole' beneath the ground, formations can vary from rather porous rock to sand-stones to clays. CO2 is supposed to be good at liberating oil from the many surfaces of reservoir rock.

[proud_yank]

Great explanation.