No Oppo Supporters - The TAN 83 - P155 disks and dairy risks (2024)

Thankfully we don't have a lot of on-shore wells compared to other places, but I'm sure we'll get a hefty dose of this madness too. The US will literally become hell on earth for most people in coming decades - 65,000 miles of toxic CO2 pipelines leaking like a sieve (as all pipelines do) in a country which already can't maintain key infrastructure like bridges, highways and electricity networks...

He analyzed more than 22 years of production data from the Weyburn Midale oil pool, which since 2000 has been receiving carbon dioxide injections. It’s the world’s longest-running enhanced oil recovery project using carbon capture and storage. Zhao concluded that “without CO2 injection the pool would have ended its life by 2016,” but that “enhanced oil recovery could extend the pool’s lifespan to 39 or even 84 more years.”

That’s deeply worrying news for the climate, according to David Schlissel of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a research nonprofit that focuses on the clean energy transition. “The fact that the oilfield would have been retired,” he told DeSmog, “and now it could conceivably go past the year 2100 is astounding and frightening.”
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The AAPG Bulletin study comes as the Canadian and Albertan governments prepare to give upwards of $15.3 billion in tax credits to the country’s largest oil sands producers for building carbon capture and storage projects. The U.K. government is meanwhile promising £20 billion in subsidies and U.S. oil and gas producers can obtain a tax credit of $85 for every tonne of carbon dioxide they bury in underground geological formations (the credit is lowered to $60 per tonne if the CO2 is used for enhanced oil recovery).

Ostensibly these huge public subsidies are for lowering global greenhouse gas emissions. The Biden administration argues that “large-scale deployment” of carbon capture and storage technologies “is crucial to addressing the climate crisis.”
But the vast majority of the carbon dioxide being buried by the oil and gas industry is currently being used to extract more oil. As DeSmog reported last year, 22 of the world’s 32 commercial carbon capture facilities use captured CO2 to prolong the life of aging oil wells.

The potential for enhanced oil recovery using captured carbon dioxide is vast. “Of the total of 600 billion barrels of oil that have been discovered in the United States, approximately 400 billion barrels are unrecoverable by conventional methods. Half of that unrecoverable oil (200 billion barrels) is at reasonable depths at which [enhanced oil recovery] may be applicable,” the U.S. Department of Energy has estimated.

‘Produce Oil and Gas Forever’

Oil and gas producers insist that even if carbon capture is used for oil production it’s still beneficial for the climate because the buried carbon neutralizes the climate impact of burning the new oil. Using such technology, “there’s no reason not to produce oil and gas forever,” Vicki Hollub, CEO of the U.S. company Occidental Petroleum, told NPR last year.

That argument relies on deeply flawed math, Schlissel counters. He points to U.S. government calculations showing that injecting a metric tonne of carbon dioxide into an aging oil well can produce up to three barrels of oil. Those three barrels, when burned, release nearly 1.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. “You’ve wiped out the savings from capturing the CO2,” he said.

In the event of a carbon pipeline rupture or leak, an explosive plume of CO2 gas can emerge, odorless and colorless, an asphyxiant that can suffocate all living beings, and prevent combustion vehicles like cars from starting to enable an escape to safety.

It was just after 7 p.m. when residents of Satartia, Mississippi, started smelling rotten eggs. Then a greenish cloud rolled across Route 433 and settled into the valley surrounding the little town. Within minutes, people were inside the cloud, gasping for air, nauseated and dazed.

Some two dozen individuals were overcome within a few minutes, collapsing in their homes; at a fishing camp on the nearby Yazoo River; in their vehicles. Cars just shut off, since they need oxygen to burn fuel. Drivers scrambled out of their paralyzed vehicles, but were so disoriented that they just wandered around in the dark.

The first call to Yazoo County Emergency Management Agency came at 7:13 p.m. on February 22, 2020.
“CALLER ADVISED A FOUL SMELL AND GREEN FOG ACROSS THE HIGHWAY,” read the message that dispatchers sent to cell phones and radios of all county emergency personnel two minutes later.

First responders mobilized almost immediately, even though they still weren’t sure exactly what the emergency was. Maybe it was a leak from one of several nearby natural gas pipelines, or chlorine from the water tank.

The first thought, however, was not the carbon dioxide pipeline that runs through the hills above town, less than half a mile away. Denbury Inc, then known as Denbury Resources, operates a network of CO2 pipelines in the Gulf Coast area that inject the gas into oil fields to force out more petroleum. While ambient CO2 is odorless, colorless and heavier than air, the industrial CO2 in Denbury’s pipeline has been compressed into a liquid, which is pumped through pipelines under high pressure. A rupture in this kind of pipeline sends CO2 gushing out in a dense, powdery white cloud that sinks to the ground and is cold enough to make steel so brittle it can be smashed with a sledgehammer.
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A Massive Buildout

Once the province of a few policy wonks and coal companies, shipping carbon dioxide and storing it underground has gotten much more mainstream attention in recent years amid a tsunami of conferences, draft legislation and interest groups.

The fossil fuel industry has gotten behind CCS as a technology that, it hopes, would allow continued production so long as the emissions are buried underground. But the immense network of pipelines needed to transport carbon dioxide to locations where it would be stored deep below ground weren’t discussed publicly until recently, nor was how such a rapid, unprecedented pipeline buildout could be done.

A much-touted December 2020 Princeton University study ― funded in part by the oil industry ― calls for a 65,000-mile system by 2050, which means adding 60,000 miles to the current 5,000 miles of CO2 pipeline.