Carbon dioxide might boost oil production in Ohio

Asso­ci­ated Press

COLUMBUS — State offi­cials are seek­ing fed­eral money to test whether crude oil can be drawn from old Ohio oil fields by pump­ing car­bon diox­ide from power plants and other sources into the ground — a process that has drawn con­cern from environmentalists.

The process used in Cal­i­for­nia and Texas for decades increases the pres­sure under­ground and mixes with the oil, free­ing it from nooks and cran­nies. It was tested by Ohio in 2008 at a low-yield well south­east of Can­ton and resulted in a 58 per­cent increase in pro­duc­tion, The Colum­bus Dis­patch reported Monday.

Pump­ing car­bon diox­ide into wells at the 175,000-acre East Can­ton oil field test site in Car­roll, Har­ri­son, Stark and Tus­carawas coun­ties could draw as much as 279 mil­lion bar­rels from the field, offi­cials estimate.

“It light­ens the oil. It fluffs it up,” Larry Wick­strom, chief of the Ohio Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey, told the news­pa­per. “It actu­ally makes it so you can push (the oil) through.”

Offi­cials hope the U.S. Depart­ment of Energy will approve an $11 mil­lion fed­eral grant to help finance test­ing by researchers at the Bat­telle Memo­r­ial Insti­tute head­quar­tered in Colum­bus, Wick­strom said.

Other sources for the esti­mated $16 mil­lion needed for test­ing include indus­trial part­ners and pos­si­bly the state, Wick­strom told The Asso­ci­ated Press.

Envi­ron­men­tal­ists are con­cerned that using car­bon diox­ide would lead to increased pollution.

“I doubt car­bon dioxide’s abil­ity to remain under­ground,” Nachy Kan­fer, Mid­west coor­di­na­tor of the Sierra Club’s coal-to-clean energy cam­paign, told The Dispatch.

Kan­fer said there are frac­tures and holes in old oil fields, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to mon­i­tor how much car­bon diox­ide could leak into the air.

Another con­cern is that car­bon diox­ide might come even­tu­ally from coal-fired power plants and pos­si­bly deter util­i­ties from mov­ing to cleaner energy sources, he said.

“The use of coal has been declin­ing for the last sev­eral years, “Kan­fer told the AP. “Instead of spend­ing money on some­thing that may or may not work, we should spend it on cleaner energy.”

Inject­ing car­bon diox­ide to recover oil hasn’t been used in Ohio because there is not a read­ily avail­able sup­ply of the gas, and much of what has been used in other areas is nat­u­rally occur­ring car­bon diox­ide, Wick­strom said.

Man-made sources include ethanol plants, nat­ural gas pro­cess­ing plans, cement kilns and methane from land­fills. Coal-fired power plants also could be a pos­si­ble source even­tu­ally, but “there is no eco­nom­i­cal tech­nol­ogy ready yet” that would allow plants to sep­a­rate a pure car­bon diox­ide stream, Wick­strom said.

The object of the car­bon diox­ide test­ing is to deter­mine whether it can be used effi­ciently in Ohio to “increase oil pro­duc­tion,” and not to deter­mine even­tual sources of the gas, Wick­strom said.

Ohio’s old oil fields are near­ing the end of their pri­mary life, and “we need to look at this before they are com­pletely aban­doned,” he said.

Offi­cials won’t know until Sep­tem­ber whether they will receive fed­eral funding

Posted by AP News on Jun 13 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.