Team ready to keep toxic gas underground
Published: Tuesday, December 26, 2006
An international research team is heading to the southeast corner of Saskatchewan to check on millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide buried beneath the frozen fields. They want to ensure the notorious greenhouse gas stays more than a kilometre underground in perpetuity and doesn't leak out of oil wells that have turned the Canadian prairies into a geological pincushion.
"We hope to be going full bore by the end of January," Brian Kristoff, acting executive director of the Petroleum Technology Research Centre in Regina, says of the $40-million final phase of the Weyburn CO2 Monitoring and Storage Project.
The project, supported by the International Energy Agency and the Canadian and U.S. governments, is one of the most ambitious efforts in the world to assess what happens when CO2 is pumped below ground.
Since 2000, more than seven million tonnes of carbon dioxide that would otherwise have risen into the atmosphere have been injected into the porous rock far beneath the farmers' fields just south of Weyburn. The first $42-million phase of the project showed underground CO2 storage holds much promise. The next phase aims to devise the monitoring tools needed to assure the public CO2 storage can be safely managed.
Proponents of the technology say capturing and burying CO2, if used worldwide, could eliminate between one-third to one-half of the CO2 emissions linked to climate change. Politicians and many researchers also see it as a key part of a made-in-Canada solution to the country's soaring greenhouse gas emissions.
Both federal Environment Minister Rona Ambrose and Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn have cited carbon capture and storage as one of the technological fixes for greenhouse gas emissions.
A federal report last spring called for immediate action to capture carbon spewing from Canadian factories and energy plants and inject it into underground disposal sites.
But carbon sequestration is still in its infancy. And Canada's showcase project in Weyburn has been stalled for much of the last year as government, industry and researchers negotiated how to share the project's results.
"It's taken a fair bit of time to get an agreement that is to everyone's satisfaction," says Ray Knudsen, coordinator of the project at the Petroleum Technology Research Centre in Regina. He says the main sticking point has been "intellectual property," some of which the companies want to keep to themselves.
"Their concern is that they don't really want to see all this knowledge get out there to everyone in the world," Knudsen said in an interview. The CO2 is being pumped down into oil fields operated by EnCana Corp. and Apache Canada Ltd. near Weyburn, which is 103 kilometres southeast of Regina.
The carbon dioxide buried in Weyburn is imported from a U.S. gasification plant that produces a steady stream of almost pure CO2. The gas is diverted into a 323-kilometre long pipeline that snakes its way across the border into Saskatchewan to the Weyburn operation. The CO2 is liquefied and fed 1.5 kilometres underground where it floods into oil-rich rock.
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