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:
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.
It’s ironic that this CO2 sequestration project has the side effect of increasing petroleum production and therefore consumption. I wonder if the net effect on CO2 is positive or negative, even if all the CO2 stayed in the ground?
A project in Ohio is having a similar (if unintended) effect of petroleum production, I am told by a source at AEP.
>>
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!
The Buckwheat clearly is not a technically oriented person, certainly not familiar with how his house gets heated and his car from point A to B. The CO2 flood – not sequestration – is a huge economic project, and the tax base of Saskatchewan is greatly assisted by it. The project, in fact, got a fair amount of push-back politically from greenies afraid of things they didn’t understand and didn’t want in their backyard. And he is unfair to the pols and bureaucrats who, just like the rest of us, want to be able to go home at night with a reasonably clear conscience. Reasonably, I say, as only God and the angels can do things without some sort of collateral effect someone doesn’t want or we wish could be avoided. The world isn’t really made up of Bad Guys (everyone who isn’t Us) and the Good Guys (Us).
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=
Doug Proctor keeps insisting that it’s “not sequestration” it’s “a flood”. Here’s the Cenovus description :
[Weyburn] has produced for more than 50 years due to technology advances, most recently CO2 flood. Since the start of CO2 injection in 2000, more than 15 million tonnes of CO2 have been sequestered at Weyburn. It is recognized as the world’s largest geological CO2 sequestration project.
The Weyburn project is the site of a world-scale research initiative operated under the auspices of the International Energy Agency, which studies the sequestration of CO2 in an oil reservoir. The goal for the final phase of this research initiative is to document best practices to guide future CO2 storage projects.
They’re not mutually exclusive. It’s “sequestration” using “a flood”.
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.
The CO2 itself ain’t wuts bad when the injected stuff goes in and then under pressure finds itself comin’ back out again. It’s wut comes along for the ride to the surface that can cause problems. Not everything in our crust is harmless when brought to the surface on bubbles of CO2.
@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.
RaymondT :
I agree all that you say in your post at January 12, 2011 at 7:57 pm.
Please read all of my post January 11, 2011 at 12:44 pm. You will see that – in its context in my post – the sentence you quote is NOT a support for carbon capture and storage (CCS). On the contrary, the sentence is included in attempt to avoid conflation of oil recovery enhancement with CCS.
Richard
@LazyTeenager:
“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.”
Radon is the result of uranium ands other radiactive material decay. It travels up through cracks and fisures of rocks. And what about oil pools that emerged naturally to the surface, as it did in Oklahoma in the 1840s? Some oil deposit may have an impervious rock dome cieling, but many others don’t and migrate to the surface pushed up by methane and helium formed in the bottom layers.
Carbon Sequestration Project – Is it really Leaking?
As per most subjects there is always more than one side. Very good article from the Regina Leader Post giving some background on the subject
http://www.leaderpost.com/news/More+Cenovus+Kerrs+story/4113466/story.html
Also numerous internationally performed evaluations have found no foundations to the Kerrs claims. Studies were perfromed before the injection of any CO2 & found equal or greater concentrations of CO2 to what the Kerrs consultant reports. Previous studies also looked at CO2 Isotopes and those studies noted that the isotopic composition of the natural CO2 in the ground was similar to the CO2 from the North Dakota plant that they would be using for a source.
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