I am not waxing lyrical about the technology. It's a solution to a particular problem and site specific to boot. It was an illustration of a 'meaningful' NetZero as opposed to shuffling the money around by speculators with carbon credits.
At the end of the day, the infrastructure (pipeline and depleted oil field) was already in place, thus improving EROI. Conceptually this can be replicated i.e. build a gas turbine power station and extract CO2. But then one ends up having to commercially sell compressed CO2 if there is nowhere to pump it to. I heard it has been done. Your EROI would obviously not improve : /.
And yes, pumping gasses (SO2/CO2) into oil fields is a standard technique for improving oil extraction. You also say:
negating the whole though of any environmental advantage.
Pumping the gas into a depleted oil reservoir is not environmentally unsound. Once there it stays there.
In a way this gas turbine power station is similar to wind turbine and solar technology with respect to EROI. Ultimately it's a workaround to prevent sudden collapse, so to speak. Bearing in mind that there are 8 billion of us still around.
No easy answers.
Responses « Back to index | View thread »