California Creates Fossil-Fuel Driller Credits When Using CO2 to Enhance Oil Recovery

September 4, 2018 – California is the largest jurisdiction in the world to pledge to become 100% carbon free in energy production by 2045. One way they hope to achieve this is by continuing to drill for oil. Sounds convoluted and counter-intuitive but here is the explanation.

They are looking at existing areas of oil production where captured carbon dioxide (CO2) can be injected into wells to enhance oil recovery. Senior Policy Advisor to Governor Jerry Brown, Ken Alex is quoted in a Forbes article yesterday stating, “We are hopeful that we’ll get to something around zero-emission or negative-emission oil in many of the fields in California. They’re geologically suited for carbon capture.”

To create an accurate measure of the CO2 emission savings, California’s Office of Planning and Research is developing a quantitative methodology that calculates the offset from sequestered carbon against the emission generated from the recovered oil.

Bill Brown, the CEO of NET Power, a Durham, North Carolina technology company that has developed a method for capturing CO2 from power plants and other industrial sources, argues that for every carbon atom coming from California’s oil fields, where enhanced recovery is used by injecting CO2, two atoms of carbon will be permanently sequestered. Brown claims the global opportunity to sequester CO2 amounts to 1.1 trillion tons from enhanced oil recovery operations alone. In effect, the Office of Planning and Research will be given the opportunity to create a protocol to prove Brown is right. If it comes out as he has predicted it means that the pumping of oil and gas from older California fields when combined with NET Power’s carbon sequestration technology can produce negative emissions.

For environmentalists and those on the forefront of climate change activism, the idea that producing more oil could yield negative emission results is a bit hard to swallow. NET Power’s technology can potentially be a game changer not just for oil and gas fields, but also for coal-fired power plants where a low carbon end result emerges even when the energy being produced is from fossil fuels and not renewables.

When I first wrote about NET Power back in 2014, the first demonstration facility was scheduled to be up and running at a Houston, Texas site in 2016. That facility built in partnership with Toshiba not only extracts CO2 in its operations but also generates 50 Megawatts of electricity, enough power for 40,000 homes. It recently started supplying power to the grid.