Texas: The Saudi Arabia of Carbon Capture?

Texas isn’t known as the place to throw around words like ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’. Not unless there’s money in it, anyway.

Texas leads the US in both coal use and CO2 emissions (about 1/10th of all US emissions), but it’s also the leader in wind power, and is positioning itself to be a leader in solar energy as well.

But what Texas really has a lot of is experience. They have been the experts for 35 years in injecting compressed CO2 into exhausted oilfields for enhanced oil recovery. That experience could be the asset needed to take advantage of a new business opportunity for Texans: carbon capture.

“If you look at where these companies reside that know this technology, they’re nearly all in Texas.” – Steve Melzer, President, Texas Carbon Capture and Storage Association

The Texas House “carbon caucus,” led by Rep. Warren Chisum, isn’t debating people’s role in global warming. Chisum says the only topic is what Texas will do about it. Almost 2 dozen bills are up before the Texas legislature, sponsored by both Democrats and Republicans, which could put Texas on the map as a contender for solutions to climate change. Some are calling the aim of the so-called ‘carbon caucus’ to be the Saudi Arabia of carbon capture.

Texas currently injects about 30 million tons of CO2 a year into approximately 13,000 wells, and these enhanced recovery wells account for about 4% of US oil production, most of it from the Permian Basin in West Texas. So far, proponents say, no major problems have arisen from the process, and it is considered safe (at least to the oilmen).

One hurdle of a large-scale CO2 storage system is the cost of new CO2 pipelines, which could run as high as $1 million a mile. The other hurdle is simply the limited storage space available.

If we consider all of Texas’ oilfields,  they could only store about a year’s worth of CO2 emissions from Texas itself (nearly 700 million tons). In order to store CO2 in the quantities needed to slow the pace of global warming, Texas would have to use the Gulf of Mexico for CO2 injection.

Even though experts claim that the CO2 injected into offshore geological formations would be safe for 1,000 years or more, there really aren’t any rules or monitoring protocols in place for carbon capture on that scale.

[via Dallas News]

Image:Clinton Steeds at Flickr

Related posts:

1. Cpt. Kirk Wants Lithium Crystals, Err, Carbon Emission Cut
2. BP Chief Executive: Put a Price on Carbon
3. EPA to Label Carbon Dioxide as a Pollutant According to Leaked Document