Safe, proven and reliable technologies available
CCS has been in use for over 40 years in the oil and gas industries as a way to enhance oil and gas recovery. Permanent sequestration of CO2 has been used in Sleipner, Norway since 1996, Weyburn, Canada since 2000 and in Salah, Algeria since 2004 – all without incident.
Throughout recorded history, no earthquake has ever been powerful enough to cause an instantaneous release of oil or gas from a sandstone sediment layer. And since the CO2 would be held in place by the very same “cap rock” that has held oil and gas under the Earth through millions of years and countless earthquakes, sequestered CO2 would not be in danger of release due to seismic activity.
For new power plants and industrial facilities using CCS to come on line in the U.S., the infrastructure necessary to keep its carbon emissions out of the atmosphere must be in place. There are available reservoirs for sequestration throughout California that have been in operation for almost a century, as have the wells through which the carbon dioxide would be injected into the Earth. The apparatus for oil and gas excavation can now serve a new purpose. Instead of just extracting oil and gas from the ground, oil wells can be used to inject carbon dioxide deep into the Earth to be sequestered safely and permanently. Carbon sequestration is a method that makes use of the existing infrastructure and can be employed just as easily in still functioning oil fields as well as in depleted fields.
One facility that would employ CCS is Carson Hydrogen Power (CHP), a power plant proposed by Hydrogen Energy and Edison Mission Energy. CHP will take petroleum coke, a byproduct of the oil refinery process, and chemically separate the CO2 and hydrogen in it. It will safely sequester the CO2 deep underground and will use the “clean” hydrogen to fuel a combined cycle power plant. Expected to be in operation by 2012, CHP will be capable of producing 500 megawatts (MW) of electricity -- enough to serve the annual needs of 500,000 households -- and eliminating 4.5 million tons/year of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere by sequestering them underground.
CHP will both extract clean hydrogen fuel from a petroleum refinery by-product, and will also use existing oil fields and wells as a means of reducing its carbon “footprint.” In other words, with hydrogen energy technology and carbon sequestration, carbon emissions can be curbed right away.