“Shale oil could produce 3 million barrels a day for the U.S.,” Kuuskraa says. “With CO2 EOR, we’ve got the potential to do 3 or 4 million barrels a day for a long time.” That much CO2 EOR crude would have increased last year’s output by 50%.
Kuuskraa’s big projections come with a large caveat: securing enough CO2 to free the oil.
Expanded CO2 EOR requires new sources of carbon dioxide, which scientists say hastens global warming. In 2009, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classified CO2 as a pollutant that threatens public health.
Kuuskraa estimates the U.S. may need 33 billion metric tons of the gas for CO2 EOR, while only 3 billion tons are available from such naturally occurring sources as extinct volcanoes. The rest would come from man-made sources such as power plants that create and capture CO2. Only a handful of these exist.
John Thompson, director of the Fossil Transition Project for the Boston-based Clean Air Task Force, says creating demand for carbon dioxide is an environmental benefit of drilling residual oil. He says residual zones are large enough to absorb half the CO2 from America’s power plants over 30 years, and he advocates tax incentives for oil companies to expand CO2 EOR and help develop other pollution-busting technologies.
“I hope Elliott Roosevelt makes a lot of money,” Thompson says. “I hope other people replicate his model and take much more CO2 out of the atmosphere than would otherwise happen.”
The seeming illogic of using a heat-trapping greenhouse gas to enable the pumping of pollution-spewing hydrocarbons isn’t lost on Kyle Ash, senior lobbyist for Washington-based environmental advocate Greenpeace USA. He says enhanced oil recovery doesn’t move the U.S. away from fossil fuels and doesn’t permanently bury carbon.
“We can achieve faster and cheaper CO2 reductions with improved efficiency and solar generation,” he says.
Roosevelt Name
If Roosevelt can get enough CO2, he’s certain he can wring oil from his piece of the Permian Basin, a 250-mile-by-300-mile area underlying parts of Texas and New Mexico and a cradle of conventional U.S. drilling.