Wow, It Never Quits -- Another North Dakota Story -- CO2-EOR

Link to Rigzone.com.

The link will take you to an article that, except for one or two readers, will cause your eyes to glaze over.

I probably would have never read it, except a) if I hadn't, Don would have sent it to me anyway; and, b) it's Friday night and not much going on. So, with nothing else to do I read it.

It's about enhanced oil recovery (EOR) using CO2. See: your eyes are already starting to glaze over.

This is how it starts:

As oil has become increasingly difficult to find and harder to get to in recent years, attention has turned to developing ways to ensure the reservoirs that are found are exploited as fully as possible.

When it comes to boosting oil recovery from North Sea fields, no one currently beats Norway, especially Norwegian oil major Statoil, which announced in August its intension to improve the rate of recovery of oil from its field on the Norwegian Continental Shelf to 60 percent. But the UK is making an effort to catch up by using an enhanced oil recovery technology that has long been in use across the Atlantic.

Enhanced oil recovery using carbon dioxide (CO2-EOR) is a process that involves injected CO2 gas into oilfields deep beneath the seabed in order to force out additional volumes of oil.

And then it only gets "worse." Your eyes are now definitely glazed over. 

And then this, halfway through the article:

"Most of the CO2 which is used at the moment comes from natural accumulations of CO2 which are ultimately from volcanoes, so they are naturally trapped in structures below ground in the southern U.S. or in the Colorado plateau. The main exception is a project based around a power plant in North Dakota which gasifies lignite (brown coal) and strips off the CO2 from that and sends that CO2 for enhanced oil recovery into Saskatchewan, Canada through a pipeline," Haszeldine explained.

Did you catch that? You have got to be kidding. An article on CO2-EOR in Yorkshire, England, and Norway, and then all of a sudden, from out of nowhere:

The main exception is a project based around a power plant in North Dakota which gasifies lignite (brown coal) and strips off the CO2 from that and sends that CO2 for enhanced oil recovery into Saskatchewan, Canada through a pipeline."

Wow, do I love to blog. I never know where I'm going to end up.

By the way, Hess/North Dakota is also shipping ethane by pipeline to Alberta for polyethylene production [this was corrected from original post; see comment below].

By the way, did you see the recovery rate Statoil is seeking in the North Sea? Sixty percent. In the Bakken, the USGS's estimates are based on about 3 percent recovery. There are indications that some Bakken operators are getting up to 8 percent (primary) recovery. Yes, it's only beginning in the Bakken.