Eugene weekly., June 16, 2011, Page 14, Image 14

CARBON NATION
CO 2 INJECTION HITS THE NORTHWEST
By Camilla Mortensen
I
n 2000, energy giant
Cenovus began injecting
CO2 into an aging oil
field to store carbon and
force oil to the surface.
Three years later Cameron and
Jane Kerr dug a couple gravel
pits on their nearby farm in
Saskatchewan, Canada; the pits
filled in with water and soon the
ponds bubbled, animals died
and clots of foam bubbled up.
The land was fizzing like soda
pop.
Carbon capture and storage. It sounds boring, but really
it’s magic; it’s like Harry Potter takes on climate change but
with fl ue gases instead of fl oo powder: If CO2 gas is a big
factor in global warming, then why not just conjure it away?
First take the CO2-fi lled fl ue gases from the power
plant; then with a little hocus pocus the gas is turned to
a special liquid. Inject that liquid into the ground, and
magically the liquid becomes part of the rock and, poof! —
your little CO2 problem is gone.
It’s not that simple. It might be a little more like a curse
than a spell, or it least it has been for the Kerr’s farm.
“There’s no silver bullet, only silver buckshot for
climate change,” says Cesia Kearns of the Sierra Club.
“The challenge with carbon capture and storage is that it’s
unproven, and we’re not prepared to deal with the unknown
consequences,” she says.
But the Big Sky Carbon Sequestration Partnership, a
U.S. Department of Energy-funded project, is looking to
store carbon underground in basalt rock formations. A test
site in Washington is all drilled and set to go, and if things
go Big Sky’s way, Oregon too could be home to tons of
stored carbon. Power plants pumping out CO2 could send
carbon to injection sites, pump the stuff into the ground
and never deal with it again. Drill a hole and bury it.
That’s much easier than managing a forest or a rangeland
for CO2 storage.
According to a DOE document about the Big Sky
project, “To date, Wyoming, Montana, Washington
and North Dakota have developed specifi c statutory
requirements to regulate geologic storage of CO2.” Oregon
is not included on that list of states with laws about carbon
storage.
THE CO2 PROBLEM
ILLUSTRATION BY DAN DEPAOLO
DANIELDEPAOLOILLUSTRATION.DAPORTFOLIO.COM
14 JUNE 16, 2011
EUGENE WEEKLY
The fi rst step is admitting you have a problem. The U.S.
has a problem: It’s one of the world’s biggest global warming
gas emitters, but it never ratifi ed the Kyoto Protocol that
sought to cut carbon dioxide emissions. Neither did the
other big offender, China. The environmental treaty, once
seen as the world’s biggest hope for cutting back on CO2,
appears to be a bust.
Under Kyoto, countries agreed to reduce their carbon
emissions by an average of 5.2 percent from 1990 levels by
the year 2012. Now that 2012 is drawing near, the targets
are about to expire and countries at the 2009 Copenhagen
climate summit failed to agree to a new global warming
treaty. Climate change hasn’t gone away, but if CO2
injection takes off, we might be one step closer to sweeping
our little CO2 mess under a basalt doormat.
Cap and trade was an option under the treaty — putting
mandatory caps on CO2 emissions, but letting companies
buy emissions credits from others who are not polluting
as much or from projects that are storing carbon. But that
hasn’t really taken off in the U.S., says Tony Svejcar, a
research leader with the USDA Agricultural Research
Service. “Carbon is not worth very much right now,” he
says. Carbon in the U.S. is worth about $1.50 a ton. In
Europe, Svejcar says, carbon offsets go for $15 to $20
a ton.
According to work by Oregon State University professor
John Antle, results from the Big Sky project show CO2
emissions in the region could be sequestered at a cost in the
range of $40 to $50 a metric ton in a measurement called
carbon dioxide equivalents.
“As much talk as there is about carbon and the effort to
reduce carbon,” Svejcar says, “we can’t get the funding to
research this kind of stuff.”
The Big Sky Carbon Sequestration Partnership doesn’t
have that funding problem. Phase III of the project, carbon
injection into sandstone rocks in Wyoming, got $66.9
million from the DOE and the rest of the $139 million for
the project will come from “industry partners, matching
funds and other funding sources,” according to Montana
State University, where the partnership has its home.
The Wallula, Wash., test site, just across the Columbia
River from Oregon, was part of Phase II, and it got $10
million in funding to drill into the basalt on the site of
a Boise White Paper, LLC mill, 2,000 feet from the
river. It’s been billed as the world’s fi rst CO2 injection
into basalt, though the project is running a couple years
behind schedule. Phase II of Big Sky and the other six
DOE-funded regional carbon sequestration projects also
included looking at some terrestrial projects such as soils,
forests, grazing and croplands.
The basalt injection site was planned originally as part
of the Wallula Energy Resource Center, a coal-fi red plant
that would have turned coal to liquid and then vaporized it.
The gas would run turbines, and the CO2 released would
have been injected underground into the basalt. But the
project, whose sponsors included Sunwest Management
Inc. of Salem, fell through due to the length of time it was
taking to begin the CO2 injection experiment. Without
CO2 injection the new coal-powered plant would have
emitted CO2 above Washington state standards.
Pete McGrail, the basalt pilot project manager, says
workers have drilled 4,110 feet into the basalt, and when
injection begins, the gas will be injected about 3,000 feet
underground. He says the CO2 that will be stored is “food
grade,” the same stuff used to make soda pop. The permits,
he says, are all in place and injection will get under way
when shipments of CO2 are timed just right. “I’ve ceased
making predictions on timelines,” he says.
McGrail is unclear on exactly where the CO2 will be
coming from. He says the CO2 will arrive by rail, “from
which plant I don’t know.” The SEPA checklist says 1,000
metric tons of CO2 will be “shipped by Praxair Inc., staff
from the ConocoPhillips Ferndale refi nery.”
The fl ue gases from a refi nery are fi rst processed to remove
other gases, McGrail says. The process, he says, is “so highly
selective for CO2 you can get to the 99.9 percent purity.” The
CO2 is then heated and placed under pressure until it becomes
fl uid. “This magical state is called supercritical,” McGrail
says. The supercritical CO2 is then transported to the injection
site and basically squirted into the rocks beneath Washington
— or in the future Oregon and Idaho.
McGrail says the unique thing about basalt is the
way it reacts with CO2. Almost like medieval alchemy,
basalt turns CO2 into rock. A series of chemical reactions
combines carbon dioxide with calcium in the basalt to
form calcium carbonate. This is not to be confused with
the carbonite in The Empire Strikes Back that Darth Vader
encased Han Solo in, but the idea is pretty similar. Presto!
A pesky problem, be it a swashbuckling intergalactic pirate
or globe heating CO2, becomes a nice, quiet rock.
The process happens over weeks or months, McGrail
says, and it works great in lab pressure vessels. “It can’t
go anywhere,” he says, “it’s trapped.” He calls it — if it
works in the fi eld as it does in the lab — the “safest and
most secure storage.”
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