All at sea - the UK's oil & gas strategy!

Saturday, March 17, 2012

OILEDGE
The US locomotive gets under way!

The US National Enhanced Oil Recovery Initiative (NEORI) was formed to help realize CO2-EOR's full potential as a national energy security, economic and environmental strategy.

Organized and staffed by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES) and the Great Plains Institute (GPI), the Initiative brought together a broad and unusual coalition of executives from the electric power, coal, ethanol, chemical, and oil and gas industries; state officials, legislators and regula¬tors; and environmental and labor representatives.

A great report is available - I offer just one extract:

"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."

Exactly!! And where is the similar collaborative plan for the UK?