100,000: The Number of New Wells Needed to Store America's Carbon Underground

Stacy Feldman, March 25, Solve Climate

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) would take coal out of the ground, burn it for energy in coal plants and put the leftover gas back in the Earth where it came from.

It’s an idea whose time may never come, and here’s another reason why, from a new article in the Energy Tribune, Carbon Sequestration: Injecting Realities: The number of new wells needed to store the CO2 at large scales is likely to be huge and unrealistic.

As many as 100,000, in fact, depending on geological factors.

The writer of the analysis is Dr. Xina Xie, a research engineer out of the University of Wyoming. She took a hard look at the petroleum industry which has been shooting the Earth full of carbon dioxide for 30 years already to see what can be expected.

If the Kyoto Protocol emission standard (5 percent below the 1990 emission level) is executed, or if emissions are kept at the 2005 level, enormous amounts of carbon dioxide will have to be injected, requiring thousands of wells to be drilled.

The industry uses a process called enhanced oil recovery (EOR) to do the job, and it works like this:

EOR injects CO2 into depleted oil wells where expands and forces oil that was once impossible to obtain to the surface, essentially prolonging the lifespan of the well. So Dr. Xie looked at the option of injecting the carbon dioxide that's captured from CCS straight into existing oil reserves. Makes sense, right?

The reserves have already been proven suitable for sequestration. And, instead of just burying a coal plant's CO2 into the Earth with nothing to do, it would give the CO2 a purpose: to produce more oil or natural gas.

However, in a CCS nation, those tens of thousands of wells couldn’t do the storage job. Not even close. Not if the goal is wide-scale deployment of the technology.

Dr. Xie found that up to 100,800 new wells would be needed by 2030 in America if Washington commits to meeting the Kyoto Protocol emission requirement and keeping total carbon emissions at 2005 levels. Daunting, if not totally impossible. Business-as-usual would require far more.

In sum, if today’s existing wells were to be deployed for large-scale CO2 storage, they would quickly run out. And thousands and thousands and thousands of new ones would have to built.