Carbon injected underground now leaking, Saskatchewan farmer's study says

The Canadian Press ^ | 01/11/2011 10:22 AM | Bob Weber, The Canadian Press

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Carbon injected underground now leaking, Saskatchewan farmer's study says

By: Bob Weber, The Canadian Press

A Saskatchewan farm couple whose land lies over the world's largest carbon capture and storage project says greenhouse gases that were supposed to have been injected permanently underground are leaking out, killing animals and sending groundwater foaming to the surface like shaken-up soda pop.

Cameron and Jane Kerr, who own nine quarter-sections of land above the Weyburn oilfield in eastern Saskatchewan, released a consultant's report Tuesday that claims to link high concentrations of carbon dioxide in their soil to the 8,000 tonnes of the gas injected underground every day by energy giant Cenovus in its attempt to enhance oil recovery and fight climate change.

"We knew, obviously, there was something wrong," said Jane Kerr.

Cameron Kerr, 64, said he has farmed in the area all his life and never had any problems until 2003, when he agreed to dig a gravel quarry.

That gravel was for a road to a plant owned by EnCana — now Cenovus — which had begun three years earlier to inject massive amounts of carbon dioxide underground to force more oil out of the aging field.

Cenovus has injected more than 13 million tonnes of the gas underground. The project has become a global hotspot for research into carbon capture and storage, a technology that many consider one of the best hopes for keeping greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.

By 2005, Cameron Kerr had begun noticing problems in a pair of ponds which had formed at the bottom of the quarry. They developed algae blooms, clots of foam and several colours of scum — red, yellow and silver-blue. Sometimes, the ponds bubbled. Small animals — cats, rabbits, goats — were regularly found dead a few metres away.

Then there were the explosions.

"At night we could hear this sort of bang like a cannon going off," said Jane Kerr, 58. "We'd go out and check the gravel pit and, in the walls, it (had) blown a hole in the side and there would be all this foaming coming out of this hole."

"Just like you shook up a bottle of Coke and had your finger over it and let it spray," added her husband.

The water, said Jane Kerr, came out of the ground carbonated.

"It would fizz and foam."

Alarmed, the couple left their farm and moved to Regina.

"It was getting too dangerous to live there," Cameron Kerr said.

In 2006, Cameron Kerr said, the province's New Democrat government agreed to conduct a year-long study to find out what was going on. That government fell to the Saskatchewan Party in the subsequent election and the year-long study was never done.

Cameron Kerr said provincial inspectors did conduct a one-time check of air quality — on a day, he added, with 50-kilometre winds. Then the Kerrs sold some of their cattle and paid a private consultant for a study.

Paul Lafleur of Petro-Find Geochem found carbon dioxide concentrations in the soil last summer that averaged about 23,000 parts per million — several times those typically found in field soils. Concentrations peaked at 110,607 parts per million.

As well, Lafleur used the mix of carbon isotopes he found in the gas to trace its source.

"The ... source of the high concentrations of CO2 in the soils of the Kerr property is clearly the anthropogenic CO2 injected into the Weyburn reservoir," he wrote.

"The survey also demonstrates that the overlying thick cap rock of anhydrite over the Weyburn reservoir is not an impermeable barrier to the upward movement of light hydrocarbons and CO2 as is generally thought."

Lafleur suggests the carbon dioxide could leak into area homes. The gas is not poisonous, but it can cause asphyxiation in heavy concentrations, which is what Cameron thinks happened to the animals around his ponds.

The suggestion that the Weyburn capture and storage project might be leaking could have implications far beyond one rural neighbourhood.

The Alberta government has committed $2 billion to similar pilot projects in Alberta. The United States has committed $3.4 billion for carbon capture and storage.

Norway has been injecting carbon dioxide into the sea floor since 1996. There are carbon capture and storage tests planned in Australia, Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, China and Japan.

"I would like to see it stopped," Jane Kerr said. "I don't think it's doing what it's supposed to do."

[ElkGroveDan]

...and let’s not forget the state-of the art “scientists” of the day in Medieval times, the alchemists who were widely respected.

[Eureka_Lead]

Back in time machine moment.....

My research and endeavors for food production and sequestration with viable options started about 15 years ago...

About 6 years ago, I had the opportunity to find a few young people that were very much into algae, the reason I brought them together was for the sequestration of SOX POX LOX from the flue gas of coal fired power plants.

The end result being a winner in so many ways to the point we intended to develop this int a feeding process for fish production, the algae having done their job were to be fed to the fish etc, and for fertilizer, and if carbonized, for the leech drains to capture and sequester fertilizer run off in farming areas.

We had many a presentation to the powers that be, and ran into the pumped underground $$ of GE. The told everyone that pumping gas underground was as safe as houses, we, along with a great many of the scientific community, showed this to be a ticking time bomb as gas under pressure will find its way back out to the surface.

Research showed that the gas will “pocket” and those gases that are heavier than air will bubble, then sit on the surface of the land till disbursed by wind movement. Effectively, a floating cloud of suffocation.

Well, suffice to say, GE cannot be wrong, we disbanded, but in the past 4 weeks, I have seen what we understood as a critical event happening, an area of high gas concentration, suffocating an area by total displacement of the normal mix of air in that zone.

You will not see it on the news, you may not hear of it, well not till now, but, given that this is happening, the fish and bird mass deaths, when one of these bubbles surfaces in a populated area, it will make http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster look like a Sunday school picnic.

Respects

EL

[Iron Munro]

The Alberta government has committed $2 billion to similar pilot projects in Alberta. The United States has committed $3.4 billion for carbon capture and storage. Norway has been injecting carbon dioxide into the sea floor since 1996. There are carbon capture and storage tests planned in Australia, Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, China and Japan.

They're trying to pump our atmosphere into the earth - like blowing up a balloon.

What could possibly go wrong?

If it works, in twenty years government experts will declare a global emergency because the atmosphere is shrinking.

[Fred Hayek]

Carbon sequestration via deepwell injection always struck me a some sort of a scam. It always take additional energy to compress the exhaust from the power plant and inject into the deepwell. Energy wasted. And what is the guarantee that it’s going to stay in the deepwell. This incident clearly shows none at all.
I am not a biofuel proponent, with the exception of algae based biodiesel. If the plant user wants to recycle the exhaust, run it through an algae system and sell the fuel as a byproduct. But then I am suggesting a market solution, and the current regime wants to replace the free market with central control schemes proven to NOT WORK.

[RinaseaofDs]

Just to sum up:

CO2 being gradually released into the atmosphere where it can be eventually absorbed by the vast oceans = bad idea.

CO2 being concentrated underground by the millions of tons in one location, where if the Volume stays the same, then both the Temp and the Pressure must also increase = good idea.

Perrier must be kicking itself - inject a bunch of CO2 near their springs and it will come right out of the ground all fizzy.

I’m going out to cut down the greenbelt behind my house so I can plant corn. We’ll need every bit of the planet covered in corn if we have a hope of supplying all the ethanol we are going to need.

[6ppc]

"I would like to see it stopped," Jane Kerr said. "I don't think it's doing what it's supposed to do."

Sure it is...it's providing jobs for otherwise unemployable environmentally aware bureaucrats!

[NormsRevenge]

13 million ton of the stuff and it starts looking like a mystic amusement park or sumthin’.oW!! uhh,, I mean OOps,, next experiment? inject it in liberals heads,, they are hugh voids begging for filling.

[6ppc]

Thanks for nudging my memory! I just added Crack in the World to my Netflix Instant Queue! Haven't seen it in decades.

[tubebender]

Meanwhile back in the La bor a tory Dr Frankenstein is busy on his next experiment preparing a real brain for B. Obamma...

[SouthTexas]

Then there were the explosions.

CO2 does not go boom.

[Dr. Bogus Pachysandra]

I, Dr. Bogus T. Pachysandra, declare a Dancing Plague upon them!

[epithermal]

Why are they wasting the CO2 by storing it? Apparently it is being used as a demonstration, while most of the bulk of the CO2 is used for secondary oil recovery in a nearby field:

“One demonstration at the Dakota Gasification Company’s plant in Beulah, North Dakota is producing CO2 and delivering it by a new 204-mile pipeline to the Weyburn oil field in Saskatchewan, Canada. Encana, the field’s operator, is injecting the CO2 to extend the field’s productive life, hoping to add another 25 years and as much as 130 million barrels of oil that might otherwise have been abandoned”

http://www.fe.doe.gov/programs/oilgas/eor/

We should be investing heavily in recovery efforts like this because:

“only about 10 percent of a reservoir’s original oil in place is typically produced during primary recovery. Secondary recovery techniques to the field’s productive life generally by injecting water or gas to displace oil and drive it to a production wellbore, resulting in the recovery of 20 to 40 percent of the original oil in place. “

Think of all the oil sitting in the USA that could be produced if these recovery efforts are successful. The current rise in oil prices will make many more recovery projects financially feasible.

[KC Burke]

you are, of course, correct, it is calcite producing animals, corals and shell creting animals that die and become limestone, not plants.

My point was that carbon, eventually to become bonded with oxygen to some degree, has long gone underground and resurfaced as a natural process and that process has “stored” more carbon than environmentalists could store by sub-surface methods covering a billion years

[PeterPrinciple]

A century from now people will look back on our entire culture and ask how we could be so silly as to think we had the power to change the weather.

---

does anyone consider the net effect of this. Even if C02 was a probem, the act of pumping it in the ground probably produces more c02 than that amount put in the ground.

[SeeSac]

you are, of course, correct, it is calcite producing animals, corals and shell creting animals that die and become limestone, not plants. My point was that carbon, eventually to become bonded with oxygen to some degree, has long gone underground and resurfaced as a natural process and that process has “stored” more carbon than environmentalists could store by sub-surface methods covering a billion years

If you follow the plant cycle, it is Hydrogen, not oxygen. Hydrocarbons.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Amazing eh!

We must be trying something like this in California...we lead the world in trying stuff.....

[Marine_Uncle]

"The Greenies..."
This happening is a two edged sword. I can see the greenies screaming see. We told you so. CO2 can kill animals. And that is the path most likely that will follow. Their minds are on one track.

[TigersEye]

History shows again and again
How nature points up the folly of men
Godzilla!

I have sympathy for the farmers whose land is being destroyed but this is funny.

[tubebender]

Don’t tell Norm but compressed CO2 makes a great propellent for Paint Ball Guns sez One Eyed Bender...

[Brucifer]

I’m pretty sure that throwing a dancing plague on somebody is hate speech. Beware. LOL!