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Enhanced recovery isn't carbon sequestration. You're not actually sequestering that much carbon with a C02 flood. That's not why oil companies tend to support
by jofer 7y ago
Enhanced recovery isn't carbon sequestration. You're not actually sequestering that much carbon with a C02 flood. That's not why oil companies tend to support CCS.
CO2 is only useful for enhanced recovery in a few scenarios. It only works in non-water-wet reservoirs, which are fairly rare. You wouldn't use it in other cases even if someone was paying you to. (You'd lose vastly more money in lowered recovery factor compared to optimal methods for the reservoir than you'd get paid. Better to use the correct methods and inject C02 into something you're not producing from.)
Big oil companies are in favor of CCS because they're the ones who can do it most effectively and have invested the most R&D in carbon sequestration strategies.
Like it or not, big oil isn't some evil mustache twirling villain. Yes, Exxon has taken some dicey moves with lobbying, but most of the oil industry has been very aware of climate change for quite awhile now and has been heavily investing in ways of tackling it (or at least they were ten years ago when I worked in oil - I assume that's still the case). They're basically waiting on regulatory changes to make it profitable.
The technical challenge right now is efficient C02 capture. We've largely shown that long-term C02 sequestration should work. However, we still don't have a ton of ways to capture carbon at scale that don't involve significant energy expenditures. The whole system needs to be carbon negative to work, and the methods we currently have don't scale terribly well in that regard. (i.e. Carbon capture is most feasible right now during electricity generation and other industrial processes that produce high concentrations of C02. To have a global impact we need to get it to work at atmospheric concentrations.) That's something that actually is a fairly tractable problem, it just needs large scale focus. To get that in our current system, you need to make it economic to capture and sequester carbon.
We, as a society, are still dependent on hydrocarbons for lots of things. We really still can't easily replace them -- we're structured around cheap fuel with a very high energy density. Electric cars certainly help, but they can only replace some uses. We just don't have the technology to replace a large chunk of our current hydrocarbon uses. It's an energy density problem.
You want to change something, change the regulatory system. Regulate C02 as a pollutant, sure. You have to be careful how you implement that, though, or you'll most heavily impact the most venerable portion of the population with price increases. For that reason, cap and trade is also a good approach. So are many of the carbon market strategies. Yeah, some of those ideas come from the conservative side politically -- it doesn't make them ineffective.
Vilifying oil companies just demonstrates ignorance of both the problem and the solutions. Big oil is part of the solution as well.
- rsync 7y ago"The technical challenge right now is efficient C02 capture. We've largely shown that long-term C02 sequestration should work. However, we still don't have a ton of ways to capture carbon at scale that don't involve significant energy expenditures. The whole system needs to be carbon negative to work ..." Thank you for this interesting contribution ... I agree that the full-lifecycle accounting of CO2 and the requirement that the entire cycle come out carbon negative is the really challenging part. I would go a step further: I am skeptical of carbon sequestration in gaseous form. Call me timid, but I wouldn't want to make high stakes bets on gas staying in the places where we put it. Instead, I would like to see a reaction that converts the CO2 to a solid form (chalk ?) that is stable in physical form. I believe that weird seed-the-oceans-with-iron-dust proposal accomplishes, roughly, the same thing - carbon sequestered in a solid, stable form.
- jofer 7y agoYou don't actually sequester C02 in gaseous form when you do geologic carbon sequestration. First off, even the simplest methods wind up with it dissolved in water. You basically can't just inject gaseous C02 into the ground and have it remain a gas. The rocks you're injecting it into are filled with water and it's highly soluble in water. Under certain conditions, you can inject liquid C02 and actually displace the water already there. However, that's mostly not what's being proposed. Geologic carbon sequestration can take a handful of different approaches. The two you'll hear talked about the most are: 1) Inject it into a reservoir where you expect it to react with something and eventually form carbonate minerals (in-situ mineral sequestration, or mineral trapping). 2) Inject it into a very deep reservoir where it will dissolve into the brine already there and/or is unable to find a way back out again due to the geometry of the reservoir. (Solubility trapping and/or residual trapping) The first method is preferable, but actually hard to guarantee in practice. The second may sound more risky, but we're actually pretty good at identifying regions that can store a buoyant phase over geologic time -- it's exactly what we do in hydrocarbon exploration. Both are being actively explored along with several others. There's a lot of geologic research being done on carbon sequestration right now (and has been for quite awhile, actually, though the government funded it well before industry started to). The risk of the "seed the oceans" approaches (or the olivine beach proposals as well) are the environmental side effects. Altering ocean chemistry _will_ have significant effects. Similarly, putting olivine on beaches will result in a lot of heavy metal contamination (you can't get pure olivine -- you're going to have a lot of chromite and fun other odds and ends in ultramafic rocks). I'd argue we're better off impacting the deep underground where more or less nothing lives than we are altering the oceans.