Scientist points to environmentally helpful oil production
| Wednesday, Apr 22 2009 07:04 PM
Last Updated Wednesday, Apr 22 2009 10:28 PM
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An oil service crew from E&B Natural Resources Management Corp. services a well near Lerdo Highway and Highway 65. As the price of oil has dropped and the economy has slowed, work in Kern County's oil fields has also slowed.
Oil producers -- including some in Kern -- can play an important role in efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, a Wyoming scientist told students at Cal State Bakersfield Wednesday.
Carbon sequestration, the existing technology focused on in Geoffrey Thyne's seminar, pumps carbon dioxide into underground geological formations, where it is expected to remain, safely, for thousands of years.
This keeps the gas out of the atmosphere, reducing an emission that many believe contributes to global warming. And when used in tandem with oil production, the gas makes crude more fluid and therefore easier to extract.
The technology is already used by some Kern oil producers. Such activity would be expanded under a proposal by BP and Rio Tinto to build a $2 billion clean energy plant near Taft. It would convert petroleum coke and coal to hydrogen fuel, and then put most of the carbon dioxide byproduct to use enhancing nearby oil production.
Thyne, senior research scientist at the Enhanced Oil Recovery Institute in Laramie, Wyo., called the companies' joint proposal a "no-brainer" for Kern.
"I think it would be an ideal project," he said after the seminar.
While promising, such efforts are insufficient to cap atmospheric carbon at current levels, he said. That's because U.S. oil fields have room for only about 10 years' worth of carbon emissions.
So, beyond using carbon in oil production, the country would have to spend about $1 trillion a year to store carbon underground, he said.
Some audience members expressed doubts about the technology's viability. Thyne acknowledged that he, too, is skeptical, but that it is worth testing on a large scale.
"They said we couldn't put a man on the moon, either," he said.
