Topic: Use of Co2 for Oil Recovery

Use of Co2 for Oil Recovery 

While the world is making all out efforts to ensure that we emit as little CO2 as possible into the atmosphere, there is one industry that is already pumping and storing CO2 into the ground, and for a useful purpose. And that is - surprise, surprise - the oil industry.

In the process known as EOR (enhanced oil recovery), oil companies have been pumping CO2 into oil reservoirs to enhance the amount of oil that can be recovered from that oil field. And it appears the use of CO2 for oil recovery this could be a multibillion biz opportunity ( http://powerplantccs.com/blog/2010/10/carbon-dioxide-for-oil-recovery-could-be-a-240-billion-business.html).

OK, let's be honest. EOR cannot take care of all our CO2 emissions, which run into about 35 billion T per year. So the traditional methods of carbon sequestration will have to play a role, or someone needs to come up with a way of making many more such products out of CO2.

What are your thoughts?

Re: Use of Co2 for Oil Recovery 

Hello altenerygeek,

I see only positives for me the end user of oil, if the oil companies by using this technique, do not have to invest an extra billion in recovery costs, and pass that saving on to me. Note the qualifications.

However we should look at the CO2 sequestration claim through jaundiced eyes. CO2 is extremely soluble in water, earth fissures and absorbed into rocks (limestone) so it is impossible to hold CO2 permanently in this manner. It will merely find its way back into the ‘carbon cycle’ as it has been doing for eons.

You tell me we emit about 35 billion tons of CO2 per annum, as if this is a ‘lot’ of this gas, which is so minute in total volume when compared with hydrogen oxygen and nitrogen as to barely register in the atmosphere – this is why CO2 is called a ‘trace gas’.

Now, if we were to calculate the CO2 emissions only from anthropogenic burning all of the earths available hydrocarbons over the next three hundred years, and express them as a % against nature’s vast reserves trapped in all green living things, the soil, tundra, limestone, crustaceans, oceans and the atmosphere, man’s contribution is approximately 0.000058 of 1%.

Forget about CO2 sequestration, it is a myth and as for making better use of CO2, just leave it to our growing plants to use as natures ‘fertilizer’ to produce more food for our burgeoning world population. CO2 at 1000ppmv can grow C3 and C4 cereals as much as 38% faster – give me more of this stuff!

And please don’t tell me that my CO2 causes ‘run-away global warming’ – I have been waiting for that to happen over four IPCC reports and over 20 years and all that has actually happened, is that both man's and natures CO2 emmissions continue to rise and world temperatures since 2002, continued to fall. Maybe a lesson there for thinking people.

Rex