DOE REGIONAL PARTNERSHIP BEGINS LARGE-SCALE INJECTION IN MICH.

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
7/12/13

The Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership has begun large-scale CO2 injection operations in a depleted oilfield in Michigan, Battelle announced this week. The company, which is working as the project’s research lead, said the regional partnership has been injecting CO2 captured from a nearby natural gas processing plant into a depleted oilfield owned by Core Energy, LLC, at a rate of about 1,000 metric tons of CO2 per day for enhanced oil recovery operations since late April. The MRCSP is looking to monitor and track the CO2 injected there, quantifying how much is retained in the formation after the oil is removed. Work has gone “very well so far,” said project lead Neeraj Gupta, who is also a senior research leader at Battelle. He said the team will soon pause injection for three weeks to monitor pressure changes before restarting CO2 injection to see how the system responds to on-and-off injections.

The regional partnership is injecting the CO2 into an oilfield located within Michigan’s Northern Reef Trend, a series of highly-compartmentalized fields about 6,000 feet below the surface that were once ancient coral reefs. “Some of the reefs have already undergone a lot of EOR in the past, so they are highly depleted, which makes them an ideal research lab for us. It’s a good opportunity to look at what happens at the end of the life-cycle stages. Because the operations are not very active, we can do our research on our own time scale and look at different monitoring approaches that may not always be feasible in an active operational setting,” Gupta said.

The group is using pre-existing EOR infrastructure in the region to pipe the CO2 10 miles from the capture site to the oilfield. They will be injecting up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 into the oilfield, which has undergone EOR in recent years and is nearing the end of its productive life, Gupta said. He added that Core Energy is conducting additional EOR projects in the region, which MRCSP will be monitoring as well. “In the future we will also consider expanding to new reefs that have not had any EOR operations in the past, and that could give us data from different life-cycle stages,” Gupta said. The partnership plans on injecting and monitoring at least one million metric tons of CO2 over the next three to five years.

Gupta Not Worried About Budget

Gupta said he was not concerned about the deep proposed cuts to DOE’s regional partnership program in the Obama Administration’s Fiscal Year 2014 budget request and the House-passed FY 2014 Energy and Water Appropriations bill.  “I’m not worried about this particular project, because I think that since we are injecting and making good progress, I’m pretty confident that this is being seen as one of the key priorities for DOE,” he said. “But overall I think that with these budget cuts, if they keep going in this direction, it will be hard to meet the President’s aspirations for climate mitigation.”

The White House’s budget request calls on Congress to halve the regional partnerships’ budget to $40.5 million for FY 2014 in favor of boosting money for DOE’s Carbon Capture research program. “The requested FY2014 funding level focuses resources on large volume development tests of sequestration technologies, injection techniques and monitoring at selected geologic sequestration site locations,” the White House’s budget justification says. The House version of the energy spending bill, which cleared the full chamber this week, also maintains the cuts to the regional partnerships, even though it does boost general funding for Carbon Storage account above the President’s request.