From the “nobody could convince them it was a bad idea in the first place” department…
UPDATE: More details now emerging – see below the read more line
The Canadian Press – ONLINE EDITION
Carbon injected underground now leaking, Saskatchewan farmer’s study says
By: Bob Weber, The Canadian Press
A Saskatchewan farm couple whose land lies over the world’s largest carbon capture and storage project says greenhouse gases that were supposed to have been injected permanently underground are leaking out, killing animals and sending groundwater foaming to the surface like shaken-up soda pop.
Cameron and Jane Kerr, who own nine quarter-sections of land above the Weyburn oilfield in eastern Saskatchewan, released a consultant’s report Tuesday that claims to link high concentrations of carbon dioxide in their soil to the 8,000 tonnes of the gas injected underground every day by energy giant Cenovus in its attempt to enhance oil recovery and fight climate change.
“We knew, obviously, there was something wrong,” said Jane Kerr.
Cameron Kerr, 64, said he has farmed in the area all his life and never had any problems until 2003, when he agreed to dig a gravel quarry.
That gravel was for a road to a plant owned by EnCana — now Cenovus — which had begun three years earlier to inject massive amounts of carbon dioxide underground to force more oil out of the aging field.
Cenovus has injected more than 13 million tonnes of the gas underground. The project has become a global hotspot for research into carbon capture and storage, a technology that many consider one of the best hopes for keeping greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.
By 2005, Cameron Kerr had begun noticing problems in a pair of ponds which had formed at the bottom of the quarry. They developed algae blooms, clots of foam and several colours of scum — red, yellow and silver-blue. Sometimes, the ponds bubbled. Small animals — cats, rabbits, goats — were regularly found dead a few metres away.
Then there were the explosions.
“At night we could hear this sort of bang like a cannon going off,” said Jane Kerr, 58. “We’d go out and check the gravel pit and, in the walls, it (had) blown a hole in the side and there would be all this foaming coming out of this hole.”
Read the entire story here
UPDATE: The Winnepeg Free Press has far more details in this story here
He said provincial inspectors did a one-time check of air quality. Eventually, the Kerrs paid a consultant for a study.
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.
Lafleur also 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.
“The survey also demonstrates that the overlying thick cap rock of anhydrite over the Weyburn reservoir is not an impermeable barrier to the upward movement of light hydrocarbons and CO2 as is generally thought.”
It reminds me of this 1965 sci-fi movie:
h/t to WUWT reader AnonyMoose
Update: Reader _Jim finds the trailer:
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I have a better idea. Instead of underground sequestration, give any unneeded CO2 to companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola that need it for their products anyway.
But it won’t be sequestered! Well, it will be for days, weeks, maybe even months. And there won’t be unexpected deaths due to fractured layers of rock.
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.
It’s hard enough to contain gas in welded line, let along fractured formations.
What did they think would eventually happen? You have a massive volume of gas & oil alread evacuated and then to put in a gas that wants to find it’s way out of the cheesecloth. Duh.
Vorlath says: January 11, 2011 at 10:43 am
. . . 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.
AusieDan says: January 11, 2011 at 7:16 pm
. . . This is getting far too dangerous.
You gotta expect losses in a big operation.
Time for a Saskatchewan joke?
Two women are having drinks in a bar when they look over and see two very attractive men sitting at a table on the other side of the bar. Then one of the women decides to go and attempt to start up a conversation with these men.
“So where are you gentlemen from?”, the lady asks. To which one of the men replies “Saskatoon Saskatchewan.” The woman immediately leaves to return to her friend.
Her friend asks “What happened?”. She says, “It’s no use, they don’t even speak English.”
More here.
“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.
Yes, indeed, Netflix has that movie on DVD and streaming.
My popcorn will be emitting water vapor tomorrow night.
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
I thought co2 was a good thing? why is it killing animals?
Barry L. says: “Reminds me of the dead village:
http://www.neatorama.com/2007/05/21/the-strangest-disaster-of-the-20th-century/ ”
According to the article, the Nyos volcano seeps 700 million CF/year of CO2. A little math shows that that’s 36,000 metric tons of CO2 annually. If we assume that there are 200,000 subsurface volcanoes in the ocean with similar output:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12218
then world wide there would be 7.22 x 10^9 tons per year of CO2 released by volcanoes. Correcting to tons of Carbon (multiply by 12/44), we’d have 2 Gigatons of Carbon from volcanoes. Compare that to the NASA “Carbon Cycle” figure:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/CarbonCycle/carbon_cycle4.php
BTW: The victims at Lake Nyos showed no signs of death agony or other sign of death by poison gas. SO2 is soluble in water at low pressures and would not cause the lake to turn over. There may likely have been traces of both SO2 and H2S present, but the fatalities were CO2 caused.
Reminds me a lot of this cartoon:
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/01/26/business/27KIM_gfx.html
Flask is right: the CO2 comes from the States, from a big CO2 pipeline that was put in place for this sort of project. I forgot.
The coincidence of digging the pit and finding the gas – and it collecting in noticeable quantities in a pit, is suspicious. I’ve dealt with a number of supposed oil or gas well leaks, and though I know there are some bad ones, the little ones I’ve had to deal with have always been questionable. Swamps, coal, and bacteria give up methane and CO2, and the carbon isotope will reflect its source, not its age of production.
Coming soon to a theater near you: “Crack in the Climate!”, because that’s what you’re smoking if you’re afraid of CAGW.
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.
SSam says:
January 11, 2011 at 5:52 pm
Now… if Norway has a sequestration issue similar to the Saskatchewan problem… what could be the consequence?
————————–
Don’t worry, the Norwegians are injecting CO2 into the oil fields deep under the sea bed to enhance oil recovery. These oil fields have been there for millions of years and they inject the gas to maintain the pressure so they can squeeze or flush more oil out. It’s more worrying if they don’t inject as the amount of hydrocarbons they remove can lower the sea bed and would more likely cause a submarine landslide.
“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.
In remote Central Australia, the Habanero #3 well was put down to 4,200 metres before the steel casing gave way in 2009 and the well was plugged. Seeking geothermal energy, an earlier drill hole in this region was rendered useless when someone dropped a wrench down it.
Now, it is expensive to drill deep holes. In 2003 UD dollars, the estimate for 4,200 m is about $30,000,000 (see http://pangea.stanford.edu/ERE/pdf/IGAstandard/SGW/2006/augustin.pdf )
Cost, of course, varies with purpose, diameter, rock type and so on, but these are indicative figures, though they do not include the cost of the wrench.
If one can use an existing drill hole to pump compressed CO2, then on paper the sequestration scheme has a chance of success.
The big unknown is the quantity of CO2 that can be stored. In the article quoted, 13 million tonnes of CO2 had been sequestered, at least for the time being. Now, uranium comes from mines a lot more shallow than these, perhaps a tenth as deep. By the time it is completely fissioned, one kilogram of U235 can have produced about 20 trillion joules of energy which is as much energy as in 1500 tons of coal, which produces over 5,000 tons of CO2 when burned for electricity.
So the question is not really sequestration of CO2, when the answer is nuclear. The uranium discoveries of my former colleagues, a team of about 50 people, have already displaced more than a billion tonnes of CO2 that would have been emitted into the atmosphere from coal.
What volume of old oil reservoirs would it take to store a billion tonnes of CO2? Seems to me, that the old oil fields are going to be full of sequestered CO2 if it eventually works, long before we stop burning coal and oil. And for mobile engines like in aircraft, we don’t have much alternative at the moment.
The logic of all this is decades old. The clarity of the logic is inescapable. All we are fighting is past propaganda, zealotry and vested interest.
Derrr, was this not obvious? If I could see this coming, and lobbied politicians against it, then why could these wonderful scientists not see the possibility?
They are asking for another Lake Nyos event, but on a much grander scale.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos
>>In Alberta they are doing it as well. Here is my plan! Give
>>away trees and shrubs to all the people in Alberta &
>>Saskatchewan. CO2 sequestration solved!
No it would not, tree planting does nothing for CO2 levels.
What do you do with the trees after they have grown? Burn them? Use them as lumber? Let them rot? Whatever the case, the CO2 will find its way back into the atmosphere one day, so at most they are a temporary storage medium, and not a cure for high CO2 levels.
.
>>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 seem to remember that Arthur C Clarke made a novel about these devices, and he called them Solar Clippers, and they were used as solar yachts, sailing the solar wind through to Jupiter and beyond.
As far as I know, the physics of this is sound, so how does anyone propose to keep these mighty sails in place?
.
@ur momisugly R. Gates & Anthony
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poe%27s_Law
This was an interesting situation. It can be interpreted two ways.
1) Gates was parodying “natural variation” explanations for excess CO2.
2) Gates was parodying himself.
Since both Gates and natural variation explanations are both insane it’s difficult to determine which one of these applies in this case.
I too thought Gates was being serious.
Let us hope the madness comes to an end soon before they start spraying stuff into our sky.
Re Richard S Courtney says:
January 11, 2011 at 5:23 pm
LazyTeenager:
At January 11, 2011 at 4:31 pm concerning yet another failed ‘hot rocks’ trial you say;
As Lazy Teenager apparently doesn’t see quotes and doesn’t read links
(“Trouble is, alas, that the technology was not so “straightforward”, for a start, as Geodynamics discovered “- Andrew Bolt , http://blogs.news.com.au/couriermail/andrewbolt/index.php/couriermail/comments/flannerys_investment_cools/ (re-checked just now) )
you might be on a winner, depending on whether LT has read the following or not
Rudyard Kipling “Certain Maxims of Hafiz IX
If He play, being young and unskillful, for shekels of silver and gold,
Take His money, my son, praising Allah. The kid was ordained to be sold.”
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.
Back in the 1960s, my family went on a road trip through the American southwest. On the highway south of Moab, Utah, we stopped at a roadside attraction, the “cold-water geyser”. Yep, it was an actual geyser, issuing from a pool about the size of a small civic water fountain. I can’t recall what the periodicity was, but we saw it gush up about 10 feet or so. The driving mechanism was accumulation of subterranean carbon dioxide gas, not steam. Since then, I’ve wondered where that CO2 was coming from…and whether such sources are accounted for in the carbon budget. (Isn’t there a lake in sub-Saharan Africa noted for accumulation of carbon dioxide, to the point where the destratification of the lake released suffocating levels of the gas? And haven’t we discovered pools of liquid carbon dioxide quescent at the bottom of the ocean?)