Competition with Area Oil Companies for CO2 Prompted Officials to Reexamine Project Details
Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
09/14/12
Researchers at the University of Wyoming’s Carbon Management Institute (CMI) will begin injection tests at the site of their underground storage project later this month using water, a compromise operators made after facing CO2 supply concerns. CMI personnel will begin injecting between 100 and 1,000 barrels of water at the site of the Wyoming Carbon Underground Storage Project (WY-CUSP) beginning in the coming weeks, CMI Deputy Director Shanna Dahl said in an interview. “We’re essentially just looking at the structure of the reservoir itself to see how the pressure is going to be, if water can be injected at a constant rate, that kind of stuff,” Dahl said.
The field tests being conducted by the CMI team are a far cry from what was initially pitched to the Department of Energy and the state legislature as part of Wyoming’s first CO2 storage project. While WY-CUSP initially called for injecting one million tons of CO2 per year into southwest Wyoming’s Rock Springs Uplift formation, operators were forced to alter the details of the project after it became clear that they would be forced to compete on the market with oil companies looking to purchase CO2 for enhanced oil recovery operations. Late last year, project managers at CMI told members of the state legislature that the cost to purchase that CO2 on the market would be prohibitively high, with a price tag of $250 million per year, GHG Monitor previously reported. Oil wells in the state face a chronic shortage of CO2 for EOR operations, and Dahl said that it was hard to make the case for acquiring CO2 for a saline storage operation when tax revenues could be earned from oil production generated from EOR. “EOR is a large industry in the state of Wyoming and at the moment [CO2 storage in saline aquifers] is not something that should be competing with EOR, so we knew we would have to make some changes,” Dahl said.
CMI to Reenter Injection Well Later this Month
Dahl said that instead of ending the project, CMI staff decided to use water instead. Later this month, researchers will reenter an injection well that was previously plugged and abandoned and conduct a series of drill stem tests. From there, researchers will also collect fluid samples and move forward with a series of water injection tests over a period of several weeks, she said. Meanwhile, CMI will conduct lab testing using CO2 and core pulled out from the site last year, which will allow researchers to correlate those results with those gleaned from the field. “Really it’s kind of a give and take situation,” she said. “It would be great to do a large-scale storage test, but I think that we can get a good idea of how the reservoir is going to react using water. For us right now, that is what we really need to know—how to reduce uncertainty as much as we possibly can with the data available about whether or not this would be a viable storage site.”
Despite the project alterations, CMI expects to achieve most of WY-CUSP’s initial research goals. “We’re not necessarily giving up on any of our goals,” Dahl said. “Obviously it was a shift that needed to be made, and we’re moving forward because we really want to reduce the uncertainty for any type of storage in the area. We’re going to do the best that we can with what we have available to us, and I believe we’ll get some great information using the water injection tests.”
EOR has Driven Most CCS Work in Wyoming
The drive for CCS in Wyoming has largely revolved around EOR. Oil companies have for years looked for additional sources of CO2 to ramp up EOR operations in the Bighorn Basin in the northern portion of Wyoming, as well as in the Powder River Basin, where there is a major oil deposit. While most CO2 for EOR to date has come from naturally-occurring sources within Wyoming, demand is high and the industry is starting to think about CO2 from anthropogenic sources. However, while the state legislature previously set aside $45 million for CCS research, the body recently reprogrammed most of that funding, leaving projects like WY-CUSP with little money for testing.
In May, state energy authorities began consideration of pre-approved underground CO2 pipeline corridors on federal lands as part of a plan to link natural and anthropogenic CO2 point sources to mature oil fields in the state. The move marks one of the first efforts nationally to map out a statewide coordinated plan for CO2 pipeline corridors.
