New Life for an Old Oil Field -- Montana, Denbury Resources

Before reading the story and the link below, re-look at this post: the Citi story, Energy 2020, and the rebuttal.

Now, the next story: Denbury Resources will go back into an old Montana oil field and inject CO2.

Montana's oil production soared to 48 million barrels a year after Denver oilman Sam Gary discovered the prolific Belle Creek oil field in southeastern Montana in 1967.

Belle Creek's production has undergone a steady decline in the ensuing 40 years, but a $400 million project to stimulate oil production by injecting carbon dioxide deep underground could coax another 30 million barrels of oil from Belle Creek by the end of the decade.

Data points:

• a 232-mile pipeline is currently under construction (cross your fingers that there won't be a CO2 leak)
• the 22,000-acre Belle Creek field includes 475 wells
• eight phases, staged from 2013 through 2019
• as oil is recovered, the CO2 is separated, and pumped back into the well

And then this line in the story:

But the Belle Creek project is dwarfed by a proposal to inject carbon dioxide into hundreds of wells that have been drilled along the Cedar Creek Anticline. The geologic formation, 100 miles long and four miles wide, stretches from Glendive, past Baker and into North Dakota.

The article also mentions the Energy and Environmental Research Center at the University of North Dakota which I've blogged about before and linked at the sidebar at the right.

For me, the Denbury announcement to go back into an old field with CO2 injection bolsters the Citi case of an energy revolution in North America this decade.