The US government is trying to bury something at its Teapot Dome oil field again. Not secret oil leases, as it did during an infamous scandal of the 1920s, but carbon dioxide -- lots of it.
In hopes of developing a process that could slow global warming, the Energy Department wants to inject the greenhouse gas underground into depleted oil reservoirs after converting it into a liquid form.
PHOTO: EPA
The Teapot Dome project, now in the planning stages, could be one of the world's largest test sites for the method. It would store carbon dioxide from a natural-gas processing plant more than 484km away beneath the 4000 hectare oil field in central Wyoming.
So-called carbon dioxide sequestration has been tested at smaller sites nationwide but never on such a large scale, said Vicki Stamp, a project manager for the Rocky Mountain Oilfield Testing Center, which manages Teapot Dome.
Used in enhanced oil recovery for decades, pumping carbon dioxide into underground reservoirs is being touted by the Bush administration as one of the most promising ways to counter the greenhouse effect.
"[Carbon dioxide] is the primary global greenhouse gas and it's growing rapidly," said Dag Nummedal, director of the University of Wyoming Institute for Energy Research.
"During the last four or five years the international consensus is that the most rational, economic and environmentally benign way of getting carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is to store it underground.
"Right now, the best place to do this is in depleted oil and gas fields."
Teapot Dome -- named for a nearby rock formation -- is currently in its preliminary engineering and testing stages. Storage could begin by 2006 and last seven to 10 years, although Nummedal says managers "don't really know the upper limit yet."
Keep it sealed
When a reservoir is full, the pipeline is taken out and the hole sealed up. "The objective is to keep it sealed underground forever, hundreds or thousands of years," Nummedal said.
The site is projected to store at least 1.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year when fully operational. It could eventually lead to large-scale testing in other Rocky Mountain states, the Ohio River Valley, Texas Gulf Coast, California and other areas, Nummedal said.
"The long-term plan is to encourage the growth of a new private sector sequestration industry," he said.
Talk of a national carbon dioxide testing center started early last year. But it wasn't until managers found a source of carbon dioxide later that summer that the idea became a reality.
Anadarko Petroleum Corp, which owns an adjacent oil field, is extending its existing carbon dioxide pipeline from a natural-gas processing plant in western Wyoming and has agreed to direct some of its 43 million cubic meters of carbon dioxide to the test site, Nummedal said.
The gas will then be pressurized and injected as a liquid into the reservoirs through a pipeline. It could stay underground for a very long time, since the reservoirs that would store the carbon dioxide held oil and methane gas for millions of years, said Susan Hovorka, a University of Texas researcher.
"That's not true of other mechanisms," she said.
"If you grow more [trees, which consume carbon dioxide] how do you assure it doesn't all go up in a forest fire or that another generation decides to go ahead and farm that area?"
Burial can also rid the Earth of a large volume of carbon dioxide in a relatively short amount of time, Hovorka said.
"We've got almost all the carbon dioxide emitted in the atmosphere coming from fossil fuels," she said. "There's space equivalent in acreage to put all that carbon dioxide back underground."
If the project pans out, officials hope to capture carbon dioxide from the nation's power plants, oil and gas refineries and other manufacturing facilities "because that is the carbon dioxide today that is leaking into the atmosphere without any controls on it," Nummedal said.
One possibility is capturing the gas with scrubbers similar to those attached to smokestacks that remove nitrous oxide and other gases, he said.
Expensive storage
The storage process -- particularly compressing the carbon dioxide -- is expensive. Some estimates put it as high as US$100 per tonne, though Nummedal and others said they don't yet have cost estimates for Teapot Dome.
Even if it is a success, the Teapot Dome project could have little impact by itself.
"Globally we are releasing 7 billion tonnes of carbon per year," Nummedal said. "The amount we will be putting away here will be in the hundreds of thousands of tonnes."
But he added: "If we look at all the suitable, depleted oil and gas reservoirs in the world, and we were able to fill all of them up, we would be able to store the total global emissions over the next 100 years."
Some environmentalists worry about gas bubbling through cracks in the Earth or leaking into aquifers that supply drinking water.
"We very clearly need some field demonstrations of a storage system to make sure [we] don't have any surprises," said David Hawkins, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Climate Center in Washington, D.C.
Nummedal and others stress they're testing Teapot Dome reservoirs for those concerns.
"The early steps of this cooperative venture show the classic markings of a win-win proposition for American consumers," Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese