November 25, 2005

U.S. Digs Deep to Solve Emissions Problem

The Future of Carbon-Dioxide Storage
Might Lie Under West Virginia

By JOHN J. FIALKA
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 25, 2005; Page A4

Delegates attending next week's international climate-change conference in Montreal will attack the U.S. for pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol, which mandates steep cuts in greenhouse gases. Bush administration officials will respond that they are doing more than critics realize, but the real action lies deep beneath the surface -- in some cases almost two miles straight down.

The White House sees technological progress, more than regulation, as the key to limiting carbon dioxide and other emissions believed to cause global warming. A centerpiece of its effort is a 9,200-foot-deep hole in the ground in New Haven, W.Va. The hole, drilled next to a coal-fired power plant, marks the beginning of a Department of Energy experiment to see if CO2 can be safely injected into deep salt water-laden rock formations, where, experts hope, it will be trapped for thousands of years. It's one of seven projects in a $100 million, seven-year federal effort to figure out whether the method of CO2 burial works.

"We wouldn't be doing this if we weren't serious," Samuel W. Bodman, secretary of Energy, often explains in defending the Bush Administration's approach to climate change.

In addition to the U.S., at least 17 industrial nations and several big energy companies are exploring this process, known as "sequestration." A recent United Nations report said carbon storage techniques could play an important role in limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon-storage is a particularly appealing option for heavy coal-using countries, mainly China, India, and the U.S., which see it as perhaps less threatening to their economic futures than other strategies, such as energy conservation or large-scale conversion to solar and wind power.

Storing carbon is a significant piece of President Bush's alternative to Kyoto. Mr. Bush's alternative is a plan to reduce the intensity of U.S. CO2 emissions, measured against economic output, by 18% by 2012. It is linked to another Bush effort, a government-industry initiative to build a prototype for a new generation of clean-burning coal-fired power plants. Beyond those plans, the administration hopes that its incentives for nuclear power, including a new prototype nuclear reactor, will also help cut future CO2 emissions.

One goal of the West Virginia experiment is to give Congress and the White House an estimate of how much consumers' electric bills will rise by adding this extra step to generating coal-fired electric power. "This is not going to be free," warns Scott M. Klara, manager of the DOE's sequestration program.

The technology exists today to remove CO2 from power plant emissions and pump it into the ground, but in some cases it could raise the cost of electricity by as much as 100%, Mr. Klara explains. The injection program hopes to find ways to push the cost increase down as low as 10% by 2012.

Oil companies in Texas and Oklahoma have years of experience injecting CO2 into the ground to stimulate oil production, so pumping it into the newly drilled hole will be the easy part of the experiment. The harder part, Mr. Klara notes, will be figuring out where the CO2 goes amid the complex geology underlying West Virginia.

"We have all sorts of tools that, basically, use sound waves and electrical resistance," he explains, to monitor the path of the injected gas, which will be in liquid form because of the pressure at that depth. "It will be something like looking at the sonogram of a baby." Computer models of the underground reservoir predict the gas will be trapped for at least 5,000 years.

The utility industry must invest billions of dollars on new power plants that may some day face CO2 regulation. American Electric Power Co., which owns the New Haven plant, plans to build two new coal-fired power plants within the next five years that gasify coal before it is burned. The design makes it cheaper to separate and then bury CO2 emissions.

Then, if regulation happens, explains Pat Hemlepp, the company's spokesman, "we won't have to be retrofitting." The odd image of a power plant with a drilling rig boring a hole next to it, he thinks, may become a more familiar and necessary sight in coal country.

CO2 disposal may be cheaper in other regions. In southern Illinois, southwestern Indiana and western Kentucky, for example, there are hundreds of old oil wells dug into reservoirs that stopped producing years ago. "We're excited about the prospect that we can get more oil out of these old reservoirs," explains Robert Finley, director of an Illinois state agency that is working with the U.S. Department of Energy on a CO2 injection experiment there. Unlike Texas, where natural CO2 deposits are cheap and available, oilmen in Illinois couldn't inject it into reservoirs to push up more oil because they had no local sources of it. But now they do, explains Mr. Finley, who says his projects will inject CO2 purchased from two new ethanol plants, which generate the gas as part of the process of turning corn into a gasoline additive. Profits from increased oil output, he thinks, could help offset the eventual costs of piping CO2 from power plants to areas where more oil might be produced.

In the Southwest, over a thousand miles of CO2 pipelines already serve oil fields, explains Brian McPherson, a professor at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, which is a partner in another Energy Department experiment to use CO2 to enhance recovery from oil and gas fields in Utah. "If we were to use this system and substitute power plant CO2, it would go a long way to reducing U.S. emissions," he explains.

The southwestern CO2 pipelines, he thinks, could serve as a prototype for a national system of piping power plant CO2, once the economic and technical hurdles are overcome. However, Canada is more likely to develop such a system first. "We think you are going to see this happen because it can achieve big [CO2 reduction] numbers and will be able to achieve them at reasonable costs," predicts Malcolm A. Wilson, program director for a Canadian government/industry CO2 injection experiment at Weyburn, Saskatchewan.

At Weyburn, which is the prototype for the U.S. experiments, technicians are injecting 5,000 tons of CO2 every day to improve the production of older oil wells. The gas is piped from an experimental U.S. coal gasification power plant in North Dakota and technicians and scientists from the U.S., Canada and 16 other nations have deployed an elaborate series of monitors to see whether any of the gas leaks back out of the ground.

So far, it hasn't. "I believe we can design subsurface systems that are going to be essentially leak free," explains Mr. Wilson, a geologist. "You're talking huge investments," he notes, but adds that the cost of burying CO2 may prove to be cheaper in the long run than the cost of scaling up alternatives to oil and coal-fired power, such as solar and wind power.