A new approach that is one of the first to successfully store carbon dioxide underground may have huge implications for global warming and the oil industry, says a University of Alberta researcher. Dr. Ben Rostron is part of an extensive team working on the $28 million International Energy Agency Weyburn CO₂ Monitoring and Storage Project--the largest of its kind--that has safely buried the greenhouse gas and reduced emissions from entering the atmosphere.

"It's one thing to say that underground is a great place to store carbon dioxide, but it's another thing to be able to prove it as we have done," said Rostron, from the U of A's Faculty of Science and a co-author on a paper appearing today in GSA Today, a journal published by the Geological Society of America. "We have been able to show that you can safely capture carbon dioxide that would otherwise go back into the atmosphere, and put it back into the ground. It's very exciting work."

Carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring greenhouse gas in the atmosphere whose concentrations have increased as a result of human activity, such as burning coal, oil, natural gas and organic matter. CO₂ emissions have been linked to global warming, and there has been a worldwide effort to reduce those emissions and their effects on the planet--the Kyoto Protocol, for example, has mandated these changes.

Carbon dioxide sequestration is being evaluated internationally as a viable means of long-term carbon dioxide storage. Rostron is part of the project started in 2000 to investigate the technical and economic feasibility of storing the gas in a partially-depleted oil reservoir in Saskatchewan. The researchers are working with Encana Corporation on their 30-year commercial carbon dioxide enhanced oil recovery operation which is designed to recover an incremental 130 million barrels of oil from the Weyburn field in Saskatchewan . The gas comes from the United States, where it is compressed an
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Contact: Phoebe Dey
phoebe.dey@ualberta.ca
780-492-0437
University of Alberta
25-Jun-2004

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