CO2 sequestration 'splodes in Saskatchewan

Gee, no one could see THAT coming…. duh.

Obama approved the Future Gen Coal plant in Illinois for his friends. It has both carbon sequestration and incredible cost overruns. Let see how that “experiment” plays out. Surely they will have to drive trucks past a picketing james Hansen.

As a Canadian, I can’t help but laugh.
“Paul Lafleur of Petro-Find Geochem found carbon dioxide concentrations in the soil last summer that averaged about 23,000 parts per million — several times those typically found in field soils. Concentrations peaked at 110,607 parts per million.”
and
—
The Alberta government has committed $2 billion to similar pilot projects in Alberta. The United States has committed $3.4 billion for carbon capture and storage.
Norway has been injecting carbon dioxide into the sea floor since 1996. There are carbon capture and storage tests planned in Australia, Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, China and Japan.
“I would like to see it stopped,” Jane Kerr said. “I don’t think it’s doing what it’s supposed to do.”
—
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
I don’t think I’m supposed to laugh, but I can’t help it.

Thing is that ‘they’ want to do the same stupidity here in The Netherlands. Pump CO2 underground hoping they can resolve the climate challenge (change or whatever term comes next…).

See now the problem here is the government just likely went with the lowest bidder for CO2 Sequestration. If only they had contacted me, I would quote them a more honest price and do a truly high-quality job if sequestering their CO2. I’m sure the Canadian government doesn’t want to be caught looking like the big destroyers of earth letting all that CO2 run wild, so I’ll submit my new quote to them post-haste.

I’m skeptical that CO2 could kill any animals as the effect would be logarithmic and would amount to very little effect even at high concentrations. I would look toward solar or ocean influences…it’s natural variation.
REPLY: You also aren’t very good at looking beyond your nose:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/27/quote-of-the-week-36-carbon-sequestrations-fatal-flaw/
CO2 is of course heavier than air, the gravel pit makes a perfect trap for small animals and unsuspecting humans.
Read up on Lake Nyos and Lake Kivu. Note the pictures of the dead animals here.
Then tell us again how CO2 in high concentrations leaking out of the ground aren’t a problem. CO2 bubbling out of the ground from any source, be it natural or sequestered, will find any low spots on the surface, and any living things in that low spot have the potential to be killed by asphyxiation. Even something as simple as making wine can kill you if you allow the CO2 to collect around you. It only takes 8% air concentration to kill you in about 10 minutes. See this hazmat source.
However, I predict you’ll try to save face and come up with some lame excuse as to why your version of “no worries” is right and we are wrong to be concerned.
-Anthony

This is exactly the sort of lunacy that ensues when one has people thinking up solutions to non-existent problems.
What percentage of global CO2 emissions is pumped down that pipe? I bet it is measured in less than a second of global man made emissions. It is doing absolutely nothing on a global scale yet probably costs a considerable amount of money to operate and maintain.

Now I have to watch “Crack in the World”. Think Netflix has it?

Dead animals may have been killed by sudden hypoxia due to high concentrations of heavier than air CO2.
I seem to remember a tragic incident in Africa in which several people died near a lake which discharged dense gas – ? CO2, CH4 or CO – memory fails me.
Checked Wiki Lake Nyos 1700 people killed by CO2 asphyxiation.

I enjoyed the movie trialer…I recall seeing that movie as a teenager. pretty well done and a message…………..Don’t mess around with God (mother earth, nature, etc)!

In the next sci-fi thriller the windmills will stop the earth’s rotation and we will become like mercury. One side will always face the sun the other side will freeze.

Well, if it was just a bad 1965 movie, who cares?
But it is in fact the official policy of the Norwegian government to “sequester” and bury underground CO2. Here, from the 2007 New Year’s speech by Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, quoted from the official Norwegian Government website (translation below):
http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/smk/aktuelt/taler_og_artikler/statsministeren/statsminister_jens_stoltenberg/2007-4/statsministerens-nyttarstale-2007.html?id=440349
“store deler av landet har vi hatt de varmeste høst- og vintermånedene på over hundre år. Vi merker det i det daglige nå: Skiene har fått stå i fred. Barn lager ikke snømenn. Forskerne varsler om at isbjørnen er truet.
I England brukte de før i tiden kanarifugler som varslere for gruvearbeiderne. Når kanarifuglene sluttet kvitre, var det et varsel om dårlig luft i gruvegangene og arbeiderne måtte komme seg ut.
I vår tid er det ikke gule kanarifugler som varsler at noe er galt, men gule hestehov der snøen skulle ligge. Avisen Nordland kunne i desember fortelle om en forvirret vårblomst som var funnet i en grøftekant. Dette er et varsel vi må ta på alvor. Vi frykter at noe er galt med været.
Vi må ta vårt ansvar. Klimautslippene må ned. Norge påtar seg en pionerrolle når vi har bestemt at gasskraftverket på Mongstad skal ha rensing av klimagassen CO2. Vi skal gjøre dette mulig.
Da president Kennedy sa at amerikanerne skulle lande på månen innen 10 år, hadde ikke amerikanerne vært ute i verdensrommet. De kom til månen innen 10 år. De satte seg mål. Og de nådde målene.
Vår visjon er at vi innen 7 år skal få på plass den teknologien som gjør det mulig å rense utslipp av klimagasser. Det blir et viktig gjennombrudd for å få ned utslippene i Norge, og når vi lykkes tror jeg verden vil følge etter.
Dette er et stort prosjekt for landet. Det er vår månelanding.
Utslipp av klimagasser kjenner ingen landegrenser. Derfor kan heller ikke løsningene styres av landegrenser. Vi skal både redusere våre egne utslipp og bidra til å redusere utslippene i andre land. Det skal vi gjøre på mange forskjellige måter.
Regjeringen har besluttet at når ansatte i staten reiser med fly internasjonalt, så skal vi kjøpe klimakvoter for de utslippene reisen forårsaker.”
Google translation (with a little help), of the Jan 2007 speech:
“Large parts of the country have had the warmest autumn and winter months of over a hundred years. We notice it daily now: The skis have got to rest. Children do not make snowmen. The scientists warning that polar bears are threatened.
In England they used in the past canaries as detectors for the miners. When the canary birds stopped chirping, there was a warning of bad air in the mine and the workers had to get out.
In our time it is not yellow canaries warning that something is wrong, but yellow coltsfoots [? a spring flower] where the snow would lie. Nordland newspaper in December could tell about a confused spring flower that was found in a ditch. This is a warning we must take seriously. We fear that something is wrong with the weather.
We must take our responsibility. Greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced. Norway assumes a pioneering role when we have determined that the gas power plant at Mongstad will be purification of the greenhouse gas CO2. We will make this possible.
When President Kennedy said that Americans would land on the Moon within 10 years, Americans had not been out in space. They came to the Moon within 10 years. They set goals. And they reached the objectives.
Our vision is that within 7 years we must have in place the technology that makes it possible to clean the emissions of greenhouse gases. There will be an important breakthrough for reducing emissions in Norway, and when we succeed, I think the world will follow.
This is a major project for the country. It is our moon landing.
Emissions of greenhouse gases know no national boundaries. Therefore, no solutions are governed by national borders. We must both reduce our own emissions and help reduce emissions in other countries. It will do in many different ways.
The Government has decided that when employees in the state travel by air internationally, we will buy quotas for the emissions.”
This is referred to as Stoltenbergs “moon landing speech”. Somehow, it is suspected he will some day regret it.

R. Gates says:
January 11, 2011 at 11:08 am
I’m skeptical that CO2 could kill any animals as the effect would be logarithmic and would amount to very little effect even at high concentrations. I would look toward solar or ocean influences…it’s natural variation.
REPLY: You also aren’t very good at looking beyond your nose:
_____
Thanks, but some did catch the fact that I was being sarcastic.
REPLY: Yeah, sure. Then use the /sarc tag so people don’t waste time with you, some of your statements here are so off the wall we can’t really tell what you might be thinking.
24 hour penalty box for you – bye
-Anthony

for R. Gates,
You might want to visit Horshoe Lake, Mammoth, California but if you love your pet dog keep him on a leash otherwise he/she might be joining the other animals killed by the non-existent CO2

R. Gates says:
January 11, 2011 at 11:08 am
I don’t normally read your posts but that one was very witty!
Pity Anthony did not recognize your humor.
REPLY: Like I said, many of his statements in the past have been way out there. This didn’t seem any different from some of his past missives.
This is why it is important to use the /sarc tag. Satire delivered onstage and in person has cues we pick up on, writing, not so much. I’ve given him a time-out for wasting my time believing he was sincere.
– Anthony

Six Stages of a Research Project:
1) Enthusiasm;
2) Euphoria;
3) Doubt;
4) Search for the guilty;
5) Punishment for the innocent; and,
6) Praise and honor for the non-participants.
Been there; done that; wore out the t-shirt.

I understand that Anthony feels pissed, but banning R. Gates for a rather funny remark is unfair, IMHO. Anthony, please let him in again! [snip. This was not a contest. ~dbs, mod.]

I would have thought a lawsuit by the landowner would be quite effective in this case. Including of course asking as part of the remedy for all sequestered carbon to be removed from under the land.

RE: animals dying. Physiologically, CO2 stimulates breathing as the partial pressure in the bloodstream rises (try rebreathing from a paper bag for illustration). This mechanism is the body’s way of dealing with the higher than normal CO2 concentrations (hypercapnia), and will blow off excess CO2 under normal conditions. However, there is a true tipping point. Beyond a certain bloodstream concentration, CO2 becomes lethally toxic, producing narcosis through asphyxia (lack of oxygen) as well as causing the blood to become acidic. Thus, breathing high concentrations such as could be found in the bottom of the gravel quarry could rapidly cause unconsciousness and lead to death.
Unintended consequences, anyone?

Just a point worth exploring! before we all get too excited!
Methane leaks into the soil have the same effect as CO2 and it kills the trees as well.

IanPJ said on January 11, 2011 at 11:56 am:

.. and what, ultimately, is all this captured carbon for?

It’s part of an ongoing series of experiments in Modern Alchemy, which is a subject routinely taught in today’s schools and institutes of higher learning.
Since lead is now an environmental hazard too dangerous to work with, they’ve had to resort to transmuting carbon dioxide into gold.

Re Charles Opalek,
According to an AEP source I spoke with a couple of years ago, it takes about 30% of the power produced from coal to sequester and bury the CO2. I forget whether that was 30% of the gross or net power produced.
We’re lucky, in a way, that the Saskatchewan well blew up in the first decade. How many will erupt after a century or a millenium?

“What was wrong with it …. before you tried to fix it?”
I worked as a mechanic, many years back, before college and the ensuing engineering career. Folks would bring in vehicles that others had tried to ‘fix’ but still weren’t operating correctly. We would ask them “What was wrong with it …. before you tried to fix it?”, in an attempt to discover the original root cause of the concern or problem. The attempted ‘fixes’, based on prior incorrect diagnoses, did not correct the original problem and often had created new ones.
It seems to be the appropriate question to ask about CO2 capture and sequestration.
Q: “What was wrong with it …. before you tried to fix it?”
A: “Uhhhmmmmmm – I guess, nothing really. We were told that CO2 was bad so we tried to ‘fix’ it.”
Also – Thanks Anthony, for your response to R. Gates. Those of us that have worked with odorless industrial gases (CO2, Argon, N, He, etc.) in mechanics, welding, heat, treating, Hot Isostatic Pressing, laboratory cryogenic applications, and installation of cryo-cooled interference fit fasteners know that asphyxiation from insufficient oxygen is a reality that cares little for theoretical logarithmic effects touted by the gullible or inexperienced.
Even farm silos, used to store silage or haylage for animal fodder, present a threat to the farmer, if adequate ventilation is not maintained. Oxidation of the silage in the silo consumes available oxygen until it is depleted. If an unwary farmer climbs into his silo, to clear a jammed silo unloader for example before the silo has been properly ventilated, they may be asphyxiated.

Dr T G Watkins
Yes, Lake Nyos. The conventional explanation is CO2 but they are wrong. CO2 does not cause boils on the skin or cause damage to the lining of the throat NOR does it destroy vegetation as was observed. Also people didn’t die from asphyxiation. They died from lung damage. Asphyxiation is just the party line. Both hydrogen and sulphur are present in volcano emissions. Since the event was discovered in the morning it had to have taken place the evening before. The only significant event in nature is the DEW POINT. Therefore it is not only likely but 100% certain that Lake Nyos outgassed a short time before dewpoint was reached. It wasn’t CO2 but far far more likely sulphur dioxide in conjunction with hydrogen sulfide. Once the dewpoint was reached voila instant tiny droplets of SULPHURIC ACID. This properly explains the observations NOT CO2. This is just another example of what happens when science becomes politicized. Oh and why did it happen? Lake Nyos is the caldera of an extinct(is it?) volcano.
As to “sequestration”. Now we have the first recorded environmental disaster caused by the Great Carbon Fraud. That grown men with apparently working brains would assume no cracks, fissures or varying porosity. Or that a heated gas expands? These people have effectively poisoned the land and the water. How long will it take for the better part of 13 million tons of CO2 percolating up from below to dissipate back to normal? Oh thats right they are still pumping. Similar unforseen problems may start to crop up elswhere.

John Kehr says: “This is stupid, but the orbitting mirrors to reflect sunlight away from the Earth still remains the number 1 stupid idea of all time.”
I thought the mirrors were a fantastic idea compared to lacing the atmosphere with gigatons of extra sulfur.

UK John @ January 11, 2011 at 12:15 pm
Natural gas is routinely re-injected into and stored in depleted natural gas wells to meet winter peak demand. The gas originally in the well was there for millions of years at whatever pressure existed in the well when it was first drilled. Gas can be safely re-injected into the well at up to the original wellhead pressure without risk of leakage.

R Gates
Magnificant! I stand in awe of your greatness.
Fred

Carl Bussjaeger @ January 11, 2011 at 12:30 pm
Here, all this time, I thought the orbiting solar collectors combined with a microwave generator and antenna to beam microwave energy to a ground station for power generation was the #1 stupid idea of all time. Little did I know!

I’m not holding my breath on this one, as the CO2 levels in my blood will climb. Honestly my BS meter is wiggling, I’ll need additional corroboration before believing it.

As a geologist, I am of the opinion that safe CO2 sequestration should be achievable, the same as nuclear waste disposal, etc, etc.
However, as with all these ideas, very careful analysis (not models ! – I mean real analysis of the ground conditions) is required. The trouble is that doing ‘pilot’ schemes – say in a small zone of rock – do not necessarily reflect the real life effect of a bigger zone. So, there is alwys the element of risk.
Having said that, I cannot for the life of me see how CO2 capture and storage is a worthwhile effort using the carbon dioxide emitting energy to do it! Maybe, just maybe, if doubled CO2 is eventually found to be seriously detrimental to the climate(though I strongly doubt it) and maybe if we have found alternative energy sources, then it may just be worth looking into – but trying it today is a waste of time and valuable resources.

Let’s all have a decent carbonated beverage while we watch the hazmat team clean that one up.
Someone should be fined for doing all of that polluting.

@Economic Geologist says: January 11, 2011 at 12:31 pm
They already applied carbon isotope …
“As well, Lafleur used the mix of carbon isotopes he found in the gas to trace its source.
‘The … source of the high concentrations of CO2 in the soils of the Kerr property is clearly the anthropogenic CO2 injected into the Weyburn reservoir,’ he wrote.”

Since CO2 is heavier than air I wouldn’t recommend standing in any low areas, ditches or holes in the vicinity of this experiment.

I would be very surprised if it were solely CO2 that was injected into the Weyburn oilfield to enable the recovery of untapped crude oil. It is far more likely that compressed air was the major driver.
How was the CO2 (from whence, unknown) collected and compressed, in order to discharge it underground?
BTW, ‘explosions’ normally require substantial amounts of O2.

Probably worth note that with a Conservative federal government nationally and in Alberta that the carbon sequestration gambit has been all about avoiding hard reductions in greenhouse gasses produced by industry.
This is much an own-goal as not for those of us hoping to see the madness and damage stopped or limitted.
And apparently, the world benefits from Canada’s forests effects on the atmosphere but according to Euro-world we can’t get credit for having them, but daren’t cut too many like Europe did. Which in itself smacks of the imperialist hypocrisy behind all this eurocentric BS. We that haven’t levelled our forests like europe has or populated as densely as they have better take notice, we are not to grow as they did.
If it insults those of us developed enough to have modern economies and standards we wish to maintain and grow imagine how it feels to those living much less developed lives. I guess we ‘developed’ nations better start shipping out our money, our bankers and politicians are hungry and the people we are appointing to keep the third-world living in the Dirt-Cookie-Age will need lots of money to defend themselves against their publics when they realize who is to blame.
Foolishness! We can’t get Haiti back onto its knees, but we’re going to provide ‘salvation’ to all the world’s poor with an invented global economy based on crippling humanity’s innovators.

To have this alarmist Bob Weber from the Canadian Press reporting about a disaster directly linked to the global warming hysteria policies is sweet irony…

This seems like a good near-term solution as fossil-fuel power plants are phased out and eventually replaced by renewables, but as with all large scale engineering projects, we have to keep our eye on regulations and safety. Is this problem a single case study, or is this part of a trend?
The CO2 injection would likely have been done anyway, regardless of sequestration concerns, in order to support Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). Oil companies can pump large quantities of steam, natural gas, carbon dioxide, nitrogen or chemical surfactants into the ground in order to obtain higher yield from a mature oil field. Now, I would be more comfortable with steam injection, but I don’t know if that is as viable or productive as the other (seemingly more dangerous) injection techniques.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_oil_recovery
The Energy Return On Investment (EROI) is probably not nearly as good for EOR versus a new oil well. Renewable solutions like wind or solar may have a better EROI than EOR techniques (and I have heard close to natural gas hydraulic fracturing, but don’t quote me on that one).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EROEI
Granted, EROI isn’t everything. A form of energy should be usable and storable. For now, the transportation sector isn’t set up to use lots of renewable energy, but that can change with time. Also, we would need to do a bit of work to set up water reservoirs and compressed air storage facilities to save the renewable energy for peak load times.
Bottom line, we ought to (cautiously) try to sequester CO2, but it may be vastly more effective to not burn the fossil fuels in the first place.

Plant some trees. They should do very well.

For the record, at concentrations of 5% in an inhaled gas mixture , CO2 stimulates respiratory rate in humans and other mammals. At a concentration of 30%, CO2 produces anesthesia with suppression of respiration. This occurs even with the remainder (70%) of the inhaled gas being O2 (oxygen). The ordinary concentration of O2 in air is approximately 20% so the anesthetic effect of CO2 is not due to lack of oxygen. CO2 at a concentration of 30% is used to humanely kill (I will not use the term euthanize) animals such as chickens or rats.
CO2 is quite different from CO (carbon monoxide). The latter is harmful in minute amounts because it strongly binds to hemoglobin, so interfering with the ability of hemoglobin to carry oxygen and thus produces hypoxia.

May i be so bold to suggest a vigourous study be done by our most eminent climate scientist’s,large grant and no computer models on the spot phyiscal study.
Then we sceptics/deniers could video the results “it would quick 8 minutes ”
and post our own climate advert a la 10;10 style with the slogan: “we told you so”
along with dumping nuclear waste in the oceans this was one the dumbest ideas sceince has come up with.

Carbonated water is acidic and will leach all sorts of nasty minerals out of the rock – toxic things like arsenic that we’d rather just stayed put. The result is going to be an environmental hell; a toxic bubbling mess that will contaminate groundwater for millenia to come.
Who ever thought this was a good idea. The CO_2 would do a lot less harm in the atmosphere where CO_2 usually goes, and where the ecology can easily deal with it.

The same people who assert that deep geological disposal of vitrified nuclear waste, contained in layers of steel and concrete, bitumen etc, is unsafe and will inevitably escape … happily pump a GAS underground and argue that it will stay put forever.
We live in a moronocracy.

Luckily enough , I need some CO2 for my new Sodastream pop maker , I’ll be right over to save you Weyburn! Only a nine hour drive.
Brent in Calgary

Well so we know where to go, when we run out of Oxygen; just sidle off to Saskwatchikan and dig up some of the Oxygen that is stored there along with some good clean carbon fuel that we can extract while we are getting at the Oxygen.
Is everybody familiar with that Franz Kafkar tale about the two towns that are on each side of this river. Everybody that lives on one side of the river works at the only factory in town; which makes marbles; clay marbles to be specific, and they have the finest precision Swiss, or maybe Swedish molding machines in the world to make these perfectly spherical marbles out of finely powdered clay.
Now on the other side of the river, everybody there works at the only factory in that town.
And this factory has the world’s finest rock crushing equipment; and they produce exquisitely uniform finely powdered clay with those machines; taking in their raw material in the form of spherical pellets of compressed fine clay powder; that has been stripped of any form of contamination, so it yields the most uniform grade of fine powdered clay in the world.
It really is a thriving industrial region, and a few entrepeneurs run a fine business freighting raw industrial materials from one side of the river to the other. Most of their shipments consist of either drums of finely powdered clay, or sacks of spherical clay pellets. They do about the same volume in each of those valuable commodities.
They need something like that in Saskwatchikan.

Eduardo Ferreyra says:
January 11, 2011 at 11:54 am
Nobody has ever thought that if gases as radon seep up from the bottom of Earth, CO2 would do the same thing? Don’t they having working brains?
——
Err, yes they do. Radon is a product of igneous rocks which have fractures that allow migration. Oil and gas on the other hand collect in sedimentary “dome” shaped structures which have an impervious cap. If it was otherwise the oil or gas would not collect as a deposit.
On the other hand if you take out stuff and then push stuff back in you might get a few cracks in the capping layer.

And now our childrens children will have to be concerned about CO2, pools of CO2 lying around the planet, so who’s going down in history for this great enviromental idea.
And whats cheaper to clean up an oil spill or a CO2 spill? like someoen mentioned I guess you pull the plug and run.

I am irritated. It’s that list of “small animals” killed. To my reckoning, a goat is not a small animal. They’re about the size of a young child, which means this nonsense has gone far enough.
Someone go wake up the WWF. They don’t need another reason to demonize coal as absolutely incompatible with the environment and completely useless, however now that wildlife is being killed and local ecosystems are being disrupted, well, maybe we can put them to a good use for once and stop this madness. Heck, I’d settle for a complaining press release from PETA.
And if this garbage ends up killing a human, now that this evidence of the dangers is out there, there better dang well be at least manslaughter charges filed, maybe even for murder. This sounded risky when proposed, and we shouldn’t have to wait for the subsequent funerals for confirmation. We’ve already seen enough.
Of course, if it fits their agenda(s), this might be a situation where the assorted Green groups, for once, decide that the Precautionary Principle should not apply, it’s worth taking the risk. In that case, I have a question: How do we trick them into locating their headquarters above the carbon sequestration sites?

Ed Reid,
Thanks from UK John, the affair needs a bit more detailed investigation, lots of opinions, but few facts.

Brian W says
——–
instant tiny droplets of SULPHURIC ACID. This properly explains the observations NOT CO2. This is just another example of what happens when science becomes politicized
——–
While I enjoyed you reanalysis about lake nyos this has zero to do with supposed politicization of science.

What goes up must come down, and what goes down must come up. The first refers to solids, the second to gases.
Pumping of CO2 in geological cavities and expecting it to stay there for centuries and millenia is madness gone worse. One day, many people will die when a sudden massive outburst of CO2 will envelop a town or part of a town, suffocating the lot. It has already happened in Cameroon but from a natural CO2 source. Imaging all that CO2 gas pumped in empty oil wells, cavities etc…..

Another Ian slimes
————
What Flannery rarely disclosed when praising geo-thermal power was that he was an investor in that very technology
————
Ian your spinning this to discredit someone. It’s not honest.
Flannery was enthusiastic about the potential of the technology and he risked his own money in an investment.
It’s also unwise to parrot Bolt. You should think for yourself. He is an entertaining journalist, but his self proclaimed intellectual and moral superiority is pretentious.
I also notice that you got shifty and “relatively straight forward” became “straightforward” when you quoted it.
Also the plant is a pilot plant. Pilot plants are meant to pick up failure modes and a corrosion failure mode is a straight forward thing to deal with. It does not affect the feasibility of the idea.

Well, if my interpretation is right, this is a really foolish thing to do. But, fracking has to be orders of magnitude worse. Let’s not lose sight of the important things. If it’s bad to inject a benign gas underground, it has to be worse to inject hazardous byproducts of a process that has marginal energy benefits.
Be honest.

The folly of one man is the fortune of another.
Author: Francis Bacon
Folly is a good way to describe this undertaking.

Oil and gas fields commonly leak – surface oil seeps are used as an initial indicator of oil at depth in new untested areas. Seismic profiles of gas-rich fields can show disruption of the overlying rock units due to escaping gas plumes. The faults don’t have to be major structures, just enough to breach the seal. The seal can be as small as a few metres or tens of metres and may not show up on seismic sections.
G

FYI on parasitic losses to run CO2 capture equipment on a coal plant:
Up thread Hu was discussing how much power it takes to operate the sequestering equipment. I work for AEP at their nuke site. For the record I speak for myself NOT AEP. We have a successful pilot project operating at our Mountaineer Plant on a small flue gas slipstream injecting CO2 into local geology. We are attempting to upscale this to a larger portion of the total plant output while limiting parasitic losses to 10-15% of output. Just today I read something on our intranet that said we are having challenges achieving this 10-15% goal. Just an update but the clear moral of this story is that if we choose to do this we will burn A LOT of fossil fuels to sequester CO2.

@BioBob
January 11, 2011 at 11:13 am
Good one. Maybe this before your two? It clarified the connection – for me at least.

Doug Proctor says:
January 11, 2011 at 5:18 pm
Doug nice piece of real intelligence on the post. Thank you. pg

This is getting far too dangerous.
Stop the world!
I do want to get off.

The small dead animals site has an interesting post by a “Doug Protor”.
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/015787.html#c566475
It’s worth the read for additional information.
*********************
I am a geologist who mapped the Weyburn field at the time it was undergoing CO2 injection. There are multiple, layered reservoirs of dolomite, separated vertically by thin, non-permeable rock and limited laterally by facies changes and local erosional events. Where the gas goes cannot be predicted with any detail. It is possible that a portion has been jammed into one pod and built up pressures greater than the caprock could stand. There are also small faults that rise to the surface or near-surface, visible in seismic: an unsealed fault could be the problem here.

etc.
********************

If I may, I nominate:
“We knew, obviously, there was something wrong,”
for Quote of the Week. I realize there have been many good ones this week, what with the Met brouhaha and all, but that one is so universal that I think it deserves special commendation.

Sounds like the 1-800 “Bad Drug” lawyer guys need to expand their vision.

Doug Proctor and Economic Geologist seem to have the best take on this odd phenomenon.
I have read about the Weyburn project and believe it is feasible, I also understand the CO2 is injected as a liquid and the pressure in the formation is high enough that it will remain a liquid.
The Weyburn project is really an enhanced oil recovery scheme and not simply a CO2 sequestration project, which makes it in my opinion the only useful reason to inject CO2 into geological formations. The quantity of extra oil recovered due to CO2 injection is truly amazing, the pool was considered nearing depletion before CO2 injection started.
I am fairly certain that the CO2 eruptions in the gravel pit on the Kerr’s farm has not come from the oil pool, which lies about 1.5 kilometres under the surface, and the anhydrite bed mentioned in the article is not the only impermeable barrier between the oil pool and the surface. If it was the CO2 that was injected into the oil pool and then escaped through fissures to the surface, why are there no hydrocarbons associated with it at the gravel pit seep? It is possible that a leak in the injection well somewhere above the intended target is the source of the CO2 because Mr LaFleur (presumably somewhat biased towards the Kerrs) has somehow correlated it with the injected CO2 using isotope ratios.
There is a slim chance that the animals were poisoned by toxic algae from drinking the water, they should have been autopsied, and if more are found they likely will be.
Something odd has happened on the Kerr’s farm and it should be thoroughly investigated. At the moment, however, it is only another strange story in the well-known plucky little guy versus Big Oil genre, much like many of the fracking and seismic stories of muddied water wells. some may have merit, but so many seem to be opportunistic.
By the way, the source of the CO2 is the Dakota Coal gasification project, which I believe was a Jimmy Carter era boondoggle, uneconomic until they started selling the CO2 to the Canadians, who built a pipeline from North Dakota to Weyburn and used the CO2 to produce more oil, which I believe has made them quite a bit of money. Maybe there will be a bit to compensate the Kerrs if their fizzing flows can be proven to come from the Weyburn CO2-flood project.

“explosions’ normally require substantial amounts of O2.”
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring. Alexander Pope
Tell it to a volcano, or TNT, or Ammonium nitrate, or lots of other nitrated substances.
“Evian” spelled backward is “naive”
There are massively hare-brained schemes to produce energy and rid the planet unnecessarily of CO2. Mad or bribed scientists and crooked politicians at work, along with great amounts of yellow journalism.

California’s Mammoth Mountain is next to a volcanic caldera and there are fumaroles that are regularly covered with snow.
In 2005, 3 members of a ski patrol team died from CO2 poisoning, and 7 others were injured.
CO2 coming from the ground has also caused extensive tree kills from too much CO2 to the roots. The area around the north end of Horseshoe lake is particularly hazardous.
http://www.mammothlocal.com/news/3_ski_patrollers_die.php
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/lvo/activity/monitoring/co2.php

The oil companies couldn’t care less about the CO2, it’s just a gas they can pump in to enhance the oil recovery from the field. It’s just an added bonus for them that someone wants to pay them for something that they might have done anyway and it makes them look like they are environmentally friend too.
With regards to the thick Anhydrite not being an effect[ive] barrier that’s a load of tosh. Evaporite minerals are the best sealing rock you can get, that’s while they use them from gas storage all around the World.

“Are those concentrations correct? Would we expect to see typical concentrations in other field soils to average around 8000 parts per million?
Tonyb”
Yes. CO2 concentrations at shallow depths in soils are typically in the 1000-10000 ppm range, increasing with depth.

Let us hope the madness comes to an end soon before they start spraying stuff into our sky.

It’s very hard to believe that these grotesque projects and experiments are actually going ahead. It is also very disheartening. It confirms that our collective stupidity is probably unmatched in nature.
Jpeden above is right: “Leave it to the CO2CAGW geniuses to find a way for CO2 to actually do some real damage.” EXACTLY. We have an antmospheric gas that is harmless, essential, and likely beneficial at concentrations slightly above current levels. That’s bad news. We need to find a way to make it really dangerous. Therefore, let’s spend a lot of money and effort to concentrate this gas in vast pools underground, so that when (not if) it leaks out, it can wreck havoc with ecosystems, and kill animals and people by asphyxiation.
It’s not like the risks are not known. The Environmental Protection Agency has a document titled “Vulnerability Evaluation Framework for Geologic Sequestration of Carbon Dioxide”
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/downloads/VEF-Technical_Document_072408.pdf
quote:
Section 4.1 discusses potential human health and welfare receptors and impacts.
• Section 4.2 presents potential impacts to the atmosphere.
• Section 4.3 covers potential ecosystems receptors and impacts.
• Section 4.4 presents potential groundwater and surface water receptors and impacts.
• Section 4.5 considers potential impacts to the geosphere.
———–
But despite the very real risks, and despite the fact that these projects are hugely expensive and have zero effect on global climate (or maybe because of all these things) we must go ahead with them.

Having read some of the comments, for those that have not seen the movie, I strongly suggest it. It is a fun movie with lots of special effects (for the time, pretty good), and a premise that will not cause nightmares – even for a 10 year old (my age when I first saw it).
And Dana Andrews always plays a good clueless scientist.

>>
Here are a couple quiz questions for people who still believe in carbon sequestration under habitable lands:
How do you know when the chosen substrate (which you have carefully tested/validated) is unsuitable?
How long does the carbon have to be sequestered?
<<
These are just silly, naive questions. The politicians and bureaucrats who approve and fund these projects are doing so for political and ideological reasons, not for economic ones. What counts is that the project get started and runs long enough for every player to enjoy his share of the good press reviews. Let a few years lapse beyond that and people will have moved on to some other urgent problem for pols to solve, and half of the pols and bureaucrats will be working elsewhere. At that point, nobody will really care how CO2 much leaks out. The only thing that counts is how much was put in!

These issues in CCS in Saskatchewan are only to be added to a long list of prior recent issues which came to light recently :
California : natural CO2 leak
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/lvo/activity/monitoring/co2.php
Norway : CCS project postponed due to health (cancer) worries
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6410YM20100502
http://www.zero.no/ccs/uforstaaelig-aa-utsette-mongstad-til-2018-en
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-10-05/norway-considers-alternatives-at-mongstad-ccs-amid-health-risks.html
UK : CCS project in receivership
http://www.captureready.com/en/Channels/News/showDetail.asp?objID=2073&isNew=
Netherlands : CCS project cancelled due to unsettled health issues
http://www.captureready.com/en/Channels/News/showDetail.asp?objID=2030&isNew=
Finland : CCS project canceled due to cost
http://www.captureready.com/en/Channels/News/showDetail.asp?objID=2023&isNew=
Germany : CCS project halted due to legal uncertainty
http://www.captureready.com/en/Channels/News/showDetail.asp?objID=2108&isNew=

Well last night, I watched a very intriguing, and very spooky PBS program, about the “Plinian” eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 79 AD that wiped out the cities of Pompei, and Herculaneum.
Evidently it was called a Plinian Eruption because the slow motion horror of the whole thing was evidently well documented by Pliny (would that be the elder ?) At one part of the eruption event, sometime in the first 18 hours or so, the mountain belched forth a sea of CO2 that asphyxiated thousands of people in Pompei. This was long before the several Pyroclastic flow episodes, simply evaporated the people, and replaced their bodies with volcanic ash “quickcrete” replicas, contorted into all sorts of grotesque protection seeking poses.
How Pliny managed to stave off his own demise for many hours, by putting to sea in the Bay of Naples, was itself remarkable; but watching the slow motion entrapment and demolition of both of those cities, is a horror story for the ages.
The event started with a blast, and a towering cloud of ash, that hung in the troposphere for hours, before the nucleation by ash particles started a rain fall, which along with the volcanic ash clouds, synthesized the Kafkaesque clay marbles (ash), that then started to rain on the city of Pompei. Well who is going to complain about a few ash marbles clattering down on one’s roof from the towering cloud of the volcanic plume. Well eventually when that clatter of ashcrete marbles has reached tens of metres on top of your roof, and your roof has become an epitaxial layer on your marble floor; with you and your house guests in between; then aany reasoinable person would complain.
That NOBODY had any idea what exactly was in store for them; nor the inevitability of their doom, simply adds to the creepiness of this famous incident from history.
Those who store up noxious anything in large storage areas; no matter how well intentioned; have themselves to blame, when Mother Gaia decides to move all that junque to some other place; where you would rather it not be.
That PBS show is one you should watch if you get the chance. Sorry, I have no idea what the name of the show was.

@richard S Courtney says:
January 11, 2011 at 12:44 pm
IFirstly, pumping CO2 down oil wells to increase the total oil obtainable from them is tried and tested technology that is used because it is economic.
I agree that CO2 is often used as a solvent for enhanced oil recovery however those wells are depressurized at the end of the process . In the injection of the CO2 in the Weyburn reservoir it may have fractured the overburden if the injection pressure was greater than the overburden pressure. The Weyburn reservoir is particular in the sense that a high reservoir pressure is maintained to store the CO2 under liquid form over a long period of time.

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