DOE - US Can Quadruple Oil Reserves - Just Inject More CO2!!

[hatrack]

File under "W" for :wtf:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The United States, where oil production has been declining since the 1970s, has the potential to boost its oil reserves four-fold through advanced injection of carbon dioxide into depleted oilfields, the Department of Energy said on Friday.

The United States, the world's top oil consumer, has been successfully pumping small amounts or carbon dioxide into depleted oil and natural gas fields for 30 years to push out hard-to-reach fossil fuels.

The DOE said 89 billion barrels could potentially be added to current proved U.S. oil reserves of 21.9 billion barrels through injection of carbon dioxide, the main gas that most scientists believe is warming the earth. The DOE gave no time frame for when the extra barrels could be added.

EDIT

"Next generation enhanced recovery with carbon dioxide was judged to be a 'game changer' in oil production, one capable of doubling recovery efficiency," DOE said in a release. Up to 430 billion barrels could be added by pumping the gas into fields that have yet to be discovered, the DOE said.

EDIT

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyID=2006-03-04T012538Z_01_N03284156_RTRIDST_0_SCIENCE-ENERGY-CRUDE-INJECTION-DC.XML&archived=False

This is just about the smelliest pile of bullshit I've heard yet from ChimpCo, and I've smelled some stinky piles in the last five years.

[benburch]

1. Well, it would be nice to have good stripper well technology.

But I cannot see this doing more than slowing the decline.

[The Magistrate]

2. It Seems Sound Enough On Its Face, Sir

It is likely not to prove out quite so swimmingly, of course: very little ever does. Also it will certainly be economically viable only at pretty high per barrel prices.

[hatrack]

4. On its face, perhaps - but this has pie in the sky written all over it

430 bbl? Where? Game-changing technology? What is it, and can we have some specifics, please? It's not as if oil companies aren't already injecting massive amounts of CO2, water, and natural gas in efforts to maintain production at fields all over the planet - in the case of the aging supergiant fields of the Persian Gulf, massive EOR reinjection operations are the only thing that's keeping production (barely) on top of demand.

On top of that, there's an even more fundamental question which this press release neatly and completely ignores - what the hell are we supposed to do with the GHGs produced by the extra 430 bbl we're supposedly going to pump from all those fields we haven't found yet?

If that oil goes to the transport sector, it's going right into the atmosphere - kind of hard to do CO2 reinjection from a moving vehicle - and the last freaking thing the climate needs now is hundreds of billions of additional barrels of oil being burned thanks to this purportedly amazing technology.

[MadisonProgressive]

3. And where does all that CO2 eventually end up?

[TheWraith]

6. It stays underground. This actually does work.

The basic idea is that you inject CO2 to drive up the pressure, allowing the pumps to pull more oil out of the field.

[sam sarrha]

5. they have been drilling and capping for 30 years, creating a false shortage

and running up expences to use as an excuse to raise prices..

i know some oil people.. they were drilling in Silverdale WA they drilled and capped 7 wells there, just north of Olympia, their rigs look like water drilling rigs.

this old timer said he never saw a drop of oil pumped out of any well he had drilled inover 30 years and he has never been out of work longer than a week.. he said we have more oil than the Arabs ever thought they did, that we will use up all theirs then when the proce goes WAY up them they will start un capping wells.

[4dsc]

7. BS alert!!

I have heard this story before and its been debunked more times that AWOlbush has lied to the American people!!

It make no sense to CAP oil wells where oil has been found.. Why would anyone make an investment, then not expect a return.. This story is pure BS.. Simply name the "old timers" that make such a claim and we'll get to the truth!!

[hatrack]

8. From "Geodestinies" by Walter Youngquist

EDIT

Myth: Oil companies have capped producing wells to keep up the price of oil This is one of the oldest and most persistent myths about the oil industry. The idea is that oil companies will drill wells and then cap them, thus withholding production from the market until the price of oil goes up.

Reality:

It is true that many wells are drilled and then capped. Almost all of them are capped because they are dry holes-that is, they are failures. Less than one in eleven exploration wells is successful. The law requires that failed wells be filled with cement at key points in the well to avoid groundwater contamination, and then capped. To the landowner who had great hopes for the well drilled on his property, the face-saving statement to the neighbors is that "they found oil but just capped the well." Only when the oil company drops the lease does reality arrive.

There are some wells which could produce oil which are temporarily capped. There are two common reasons for this. One is that there is no facility for transporting the oil from the well at the moment. Either a pipeline does not exist or it is too expensive to truck it out. Generally, if the well is a producer, other wells will be drilled in the area to establish the presence of enough recoverable oil to justify developing a transport system by which the oil can be brought out economically.

A second reason may be that occasionally it is true a well may be drilled, completed, and capped when the current price of oil is not high enough to pay for the expenses of producing the oil-the pumping costs and perhaps the problem of the disposal of the salt water which may be produced with the oil. However, capping a well and leaving it for a time is risky because sometimes the well cannot be restored to production.

Drilling a well is so costly that if the well is productive and capable of bringing a return on investment, the well will be produced. If a million dollars is involved in exploration, lease, and drilling costs-and one million is much less than many wells cost-then the cost of that money in lost interest which that money would otherwise bring, demands that the well be produced. No one can afford to tie up a million dollars, or many millions with no economic return. And it is not done.

EDIT

http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/youngquist_geodestinies1.html

[petronius]

9. Is injecting CO2 any more (or less) efficient than injecting water?

On the face of it, this sounds like a win-win sort of situation - reduce CO2 emissions while at the same time offsetting the cost of sequestration by producing more energy. I wonder though, if it's a bit of a shell game, where we'll eventually learn that it is too expensive to capture all that CO2 for sequestering, but we can get the same production increases from water injection - end result: no reduction in GHGs but a jump in oil production...

Carbon sequestration sounds like a good idea, but I can't imagine that any mediation strategy is close to being as effective as reducing emissions in the first place...