Full Title: Carbon Dioxide Enhanced Oil Recovery: A Critical Domestic Energy, Economic, and Environmental Opportunity
Author(s): Center for Climate and Energy Solutions
Publisher(s): Center for Climate and Energy Solutions
Publication Date: February 1, 2012
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
Amidst economic uncertainty, fiscal crisis and political division over energy policy, carbon dioxide enhanced oil recovery (CO2-EOR) offers a safe and commercially proven method of domestic oil production that can help the United States simultaneously address three urgent national priorities:
- Increasing our nation’s energy security by reducing dependence on foreign oil, often imported from unstable and hostile regimes;
- Supporting job creation, increasing tax revenue, and reducing our trade deficit by keeping dollars now spent on oil imports here at home and at work in the U.S. economy; and
- Protecting the environment by capturing and storing CO2 from industrial facilities and power plants, while getting more American crude from areas already developed for oil and gas production.
A largely unheralded example of American ingenuity, CO2-EOR was pioneered in West Texas in 1972 as a way to sustain oil production in otherwise declining oil fields. It works by injecting CO2 obtained from natural or man-made sources into existing oil fields to free up additional crude oil trapped in rock formations. In this way, CO2– EOR can significantly extend the lifespan and revitalize production of mature oil fields in the United States.