The rolling prairies of northeastern Wyoming have been a haven of lush knee-deep grass for sheep, cattle and pronghorn antelope this summer.
But it’s a different green, a greener energy, that geologist Fred McLaughlin seeks as he drills nearly two miles (3.2 kilometers) into the ground, much deeper than the thick coal seams that make this the premier mining region. of coal in the United States. McLaughlin and colleagues at the University of Wyoming are studying whether tiny spaces deep in rock can permanently store large volumes of greenhouse gases emitted by a coal-fired power plant.
This is the concept known as carbon storage, long touted as a response to global warming that preserves the energy industry’s burning of fossil fuels to generate electricity.
Until now, removing carbon dioxide from power plant smokestacks and pumping it underground hasn’t been feasible without higher electricity bills to cover the huge costs of the technique. But with a $2.5 billion infusion from Congress last year and now increased tax incentives through the Inflation Reduction Act passed by Congress on Friday, researchers and industry are continuing to try.
One of the goals of the McLaughlin project is to preserve the life of a relatively new coal-fired power plant, the Dry Fork Station, managed by the Basin Electric Power Cooperative. State officials hope it will do the same for the entire beleaguered coal industry that still supports Wyoming’s economy. The state produces about 40% of the nation’s coal, but production is declining and there are a number of layoffs and bankruptcies. have beset the vast open pit coal mines of the Gillette area in the last decade.
While the economics of carbon storage remain uncertain at best, McLaughlin and others are confident in the technology.
“The geology exists,” McLaughlin said. “It’s a resource we’re looking at, and the resource is pore space.”
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HOW DOES IT WORK
By pore space, McLaughlin is not referring to skincare but to the microscopic spaces between sandstone grains deep underground. Countless such spaces add up: enough, he hopes, to hold 55 million tons (50 million metric tons) of carbon dioxide for 30 years.
McLaughlin and his team used the same drilling equipment as the oil industry to drill their two wells to nearly 10,000 feet (3,000 meters), taking core samples from nine geological formations in the process. The researchers will study how injection into one well, using saltwater as a substitute for liquid carbon dioxide, might affect fluid behavior in the other.
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“It’s basically like a call and response, if you want to think of it that way,” McLaughlin said. “We can base the truth on our simulations.”
McLaughlin’s team too does a lot of lab work on carbon sequestration at the University of Wyoming’s School of Energy Resources in Laramie, studying on a microscopic scale how much carbon dioxide different layers of sandstone can hold. They model in computers how much carbon dioxide, well by well, could be pumped underground north of Gillette.
Eventually, they want to move on to carbon dioxide captured from the plume at the nearby Dry Fork station, using a technique developed by California-based Membrane Technology and Research, Inc.
WYOMING’S CARBON DREAMS
With an eye on carbon storage, Wyoming in 2020 became one of two states, along with North Dakota, to take over from the lead authority of the US Environmental Protection Agency to issue the type of permit McLaughlin and his team will need to pump large volumes of carbon dioxide, pressurized into a “supercritical” high density. ” state, underground.
In addition to the permit, the geologists will also need more funds. The US Department of Energy’s Carbon Storage Assurance Facility Company (CarbonSAFE) program is financing 24 carbon capture and storage projects nationwide, and this is one of the most advanced.
Such projects were likely already eligible for some of the roughly $2.5 billion in last year’s infrastructure bill. Now, the new Inflation Reduction Act will boost the “45Q” tax credit for electricity producers that sequester their carbon from $50 to $85 per ton.
Pumping carbon dioxide underground is nothing new. For decades, the oil and gas industry has used carbon dioxide, after separating it from methane that is sold to fuel stoves and furnaces, to recharge aging oil fields.
SO FAR, FAILED EXPERIMENTS
Critics, however, point out that the process is expensive to use at power plants and provides something of a lifeline for the coal, oil and natural gas industries when the world, they say, should stop using fossil fuels. completely.
To date, only one commercially operational large-scale project in the US has pumped carbon dioxide from an underground power plant. But to defray costs, NRG Energy’s Petra Nova coal-fired power plant outside Houston sold its carbon dioxide increase local oil production.
After three years in operation, Petra Nova closed in 2020, when low oil prices made using the gas to recharge a nearby oil field unprofitable.
In December, a review by the US Government Accountability Office. found that Petra Nova was the only one of eight coal-fired carbon capture and storage projects to actually come online, after securing $684 million in funding from the Department of Energy since 2009.
Some communities that have grappled for years with industrial air pollution don’t worry too that companies will use promises of carbon storage as a form of expansion.
For Massachusetts Institute of Technology research engineer Howard Herzog, a pioneer in carbon capture and storage, the question is not whether the technique is technically feasible at scale. He is sure that it is. But whether it can be economically feasible is a different matter.
“People are starting to take it more seriously even though fundamentally changing our power systems is not an easy task,” Herzog said. “It’s not something you do in the short term. You have to really set the policy and we haven’t done that yet.”
It can be expensive, Herzog said. But doing nothing when it comes to the weather “can be much more costly.”