June 18, 2007

British Columbia’s Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources will be watching with interest over the next several years to see how successfully its partnership with a group of six U.S. states and 60 other private companies and agencies can store the greenhouse gas blamed for cooking the planet.

The province is a participant in the West Coast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (WESTCARB), which will spend $5 million (US) to inject 3,000 to 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) more than 3,000 feet into a reservoir near Thornton, California, that has yielded 54.5 billion cubic feet of gas in the past.

Thornton, located midway between Stockton and Sacramento, was selected for the test because the sand and saltwater reservoir that remains is viewed as ideal for storing large amounts of CO2.

The WESTCARB coalition has received a grant of $14.3 million (US) from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to test two geologic formations in the Rio Vista area near Thornton and to conduct other tests.

WESTCARB is one of seven regional partnerships receiving money from the DOE to test CO2 sequestration. In 2005 the DOE announced funding of $145 million for the partnerships. Last September, the department announced it will provide an additional $450 million over the next 10 years to validate that the capture, transportation, injection and long-term storage of CO2 can be done safely, permanently and economically.

Two of those partnerships, WESTCARB and the Plains CO2 Reduction Partnership, include Canadian provinces. The latter, led by the Energy & Environmental Research Center at the University of North Dakota, includes Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Montana, Wyoming and Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

The WESTCARB partnership includes representation from Alaska, Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and B.C.

The Thornton project is being led by the California Energy Commission.

Commission spokesman Adam Gottlieb says the Thornton site is ideal because its deposits of porous sandstone and salty water capped by a layer of shale will keep the CO2 from escaping.

He says CO2 produced by power plants as a byproduct of burning natural gas will be trucked to the site for injection. Another source could be emissions from a nearby oil refinery.

“What’s exciting is we’re on the cutting edge on a lot of this science, and it’s fascinating to study and explore this in the backyard of our Central Valley [the name of the region],” Gottlieb said to the Stockton Record, a local newspaper.

He told Energy Evolution that although the B.C. government isn’t directly involved in the test it will receive and be able to monitor the results on a regular basis.

“British Columbia’s role is an informational one,” he says. “We share facts and publications with them and best practices. We have no physical projects planned at this time [in the province].”

Sally Benson, director of the Global Climate and Energy Project at the San Francisco area’s Stanford University, who is the pilot test leader for the project, says the Thornton reservoir should be perfect for CO2 sequestration.

“Since the area is known to trap natural gas, it makes a lot of sense,” she told the paper. “If it’s in those gas formations, there’s no reason to believe it’s going to leak.”

Injections should start this summer.

“We’ll have sensors at the injection sites to see if anything is released and, beyond that, we’ll be looking to see how it moves in the reservoir.”

Researchers already know that CO2 trapped in the right kind of rock formation will remain trapped, since the Earth already contains pockets of CO2. Under pressure, the gas turns into a liquid, Benson says.

“Oil [and gas] reservoirs have existed for millions of years, so we’re looking for formations like that, with a good cap-rock layer.”

The state energy commission is negotiating with the property owners for the right to use the land for the test.

The Central Valley has been home to thousands of natural gas wells over the years.

The U.S. is the leading emitter of CO2 in the world, at about 1.57 billion metric tonnes a year, most of it from the production and consumption of fossil fuels. That’s about 24% of the world’s total CO2 emissions of 6.69 billion metric tonnes (all figures based on 2003 statistics).

The partnerships have identified sequestration opportunities across the U.S. that have the potential to store more than 600 billion tonnes of CO2, the equivalent of more than 200 years of emissions from energy sources in the U.S., says the DOE.

“I think we can identify enough good sites where CO2 will stay underground and it will do what we expect it to do, which is to basically be permanently sequestered,” says WESTCARB’s Benson. “I think we can find enough sites so that it’s definitely worth getting started and it’s much better than just continuing to put CO2 in the atmosphere.”

One problem is that there is little incentive now for coal-fired utility operators and the oil and gas industry to capture and recycle or sequester CO2.

However, carbon trading systems, now coming into place in Europe and Japan, are placing a high enough value on CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions to provide an incentive for capture. There are predictions that the U.S., especially after the Bush administration leaves office, will impose some sort of mandatory CO2 capture and trade system and the federal Conservative’s recently announced green plan also suggests Canada will eventually move in the same direction.

The plan sets a limit of $15 a tonne for CO2, but says this will rise over time. It is projected that world prices will rise to $50 to $100 a tonne in the next decade or two. (With files from the Stockton Record)