80 MORE YEARS OF OIL: THE GREAT ATTRACTION OF CARBON CAPTURE

SOURCE: oil price

In recent years, Big Oil has invested heavily in carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, supposedly to offset CO2 emissions from the energy feedstocks they produce.

Environmentalists have largely dismissed these efforts as mere greenwashing, and experts warn that CCS technology has so far not been tested at the scale needed for significant decarbonization. Well, environmentalists may have been right all along, as new research reveals that trapping

of carbon can prolong the productivity of almost depleted oil fields for many decades. Calgary-based senior geological consultant Menhwei Zhao has conducted a study in the AAPG Bulletin on the use of CCS in enhanced oil recovery (EPR). Zhao analyzed more than 22 years of production data from the Weyburn Midale oil reserve in Saskatchewan, which has been receiving carbon dioxide injections since 2000, making it the oldest EOR project in the world. Zhao concluded that the pool would have stopped producing oil in 2016 without CO2 injection, but that "enhanced oil recovery could extend the life of the pool by up to 39 or even 84 more years." Although Zhao acknowledges that he focused on a specific project in Canada, he says he would expect to see "similar results" in large-scale CCS projects around the world.