May 06, 2007 - 04:15:07 CDT
Bismarck Tribune
By LAUREN DONOVBy LAUREN DONOVAN
WEYBURN, Saskatchewan - A town that looks and feels a lot like a Canadian Dickinson has North Dakota to thank.
Weyburn bustles, like Dickinson. It also has about 10,000 people and an exterior skirting of box stores, new housing and fast chicken and burger joints.
It has a cool mayor, like Dickinson, the kind who radiates optimism, pride and intelligence, the difference being the Weyburn mayor puts on her lipstick before heading down to city hall.
But most to the point, they have oil in common.
In Weyburn, the oil buzz would be at a much lower pitch if it weren't for a pipeline that comes all the way from Beulah, about 200 miles southeast as a strong crow would fly.
The pipeline carries carbon dioxide, one of the most common molecule bonds on earth.
It's made at Dakota Gasification Co., from melting and stripping lignite into a synthetic natural gas.
DGC is the largest commercial supplier of CO2 anywhere in the world. The carbon-oxygen gas might be everywhere, but it's invisibly nowhere outside of a few gas processes with the ability to gather it up.
The EnCana Corp. takes all DGC has to sell and reaps a tremendous financial benefit because of it.
EnCana injects the buoyant carbon gas 5,000 feet deep into the Weyburn field - named for the town - and wrings 16 percent more oil out of the old field.
The oil field is more than 50 years old, and production was slowing down when the pressurized CO2 arrived in 2000 under a 15-year contract.
Now, the field will produce another 30 years, possibly as many as 100. Production has jumped by 10,000 barrels a day.
The Weyburn field is 70 square miles, stem to stern, laid down on Canadian prairie.
A North Dakotan, used to the spacing between oil jacks here, would be shocked by how many jacks and rigs are squeezed into a relatively small area dotted by farms and cows.
Busy doesn't describe it.
The company is sinking new oil wells, gas injection wells and has constructed a facility that recycles the portion of CO2 that comes back up with oil for reinjection.
It's also hosting visitors from around the country and the world who want to learn about using CO2 to enhance oil recovery. Most want to learn about an environmental side benefit called sequestration.
Except for the relatively small amount of CO2 that comes back up with oil, 80 percent stays in the ground, trapped or sequestered in rock and beneath aquifers, all that stuff down there no one can see.
That's an environmental win-win because it is among greenhouse gases blamed for what some consider an alarming warming trend on the planet.
Sequestration may be the future for CO2 control.
The international visitors add to the action. And EnCana definitely has a new lease on life out in its Weyburn and adjacent Midale fields. And thus, does the town.
Mayor Debra Button, professional in a navy pantsuit, takes care of business afternoons in her spacious office down at city hall.
She said EnCana means 60 full-time employees with good jobs and the better houses in town, kids in school, business at the grocery store and a coterie of subcontractors who do everything from well service to electrical work in the field.
"It would be hell if they left," she said.
At the chamber office down the block, next to a store that sells skateboards and hip clothes, chamber manager Jeff Richards said the value of having a vibrant EnCana is "immeasurable." He said the town would be there without the company, but "we'd have to work an awful lot harder at a lot of things."
Button said the company is a community team player. It just gave $50,000 to the Weyburn Redwings junior hockey team.
It can afford it.
Twila Walkenden, EnCana spokeswoman, said the economics of buying CO2 and building the injection wells and recovery system worked at $18 a barrel. It works three times more profitably at $60 a barrel.
Button said people had questions about the CO2. They wanted to know if it would stay in the ground once it was injected there.
One person who's providing answers is Ray Knudsen.
He directs sequestration research for the Petroleum Technical Research Center in provincial Saskatchewan.
The arrival of more CO2 than anywhere in the world presented a fabulous opportunity to piggyback a scientific look.
Three years later, geologists - about to go to another round with recently announced support from a subsidiary of Aramco - know a fair amount about all that CO2 sunk into the Weyburn geological strata. So far, it amounts to about 22 million tons, or 3.2 million tons a year.
It hasn't percolated up into sub soils. It hasn't appeared in relatively shallow ranch water wells. It appears to flow directionally with oil, which is a good thing for the oil operators.
But it does appear - at least in the laboratory - to decay concrete to an extent.
Knudsen said that's a problem because, when operators quit an oil well, or an entire field, they plug the well holes with concrete before they go.
If the CO2 ate away at those plugs over time, eventually the 700 oil wells in the Weyburn field could become vents.
The carbon gas isn't toxic, and it would just join trillions of other tons already in the atmosphere.
But the expense of sequestration would be for naught if it eventually escaped decades or centuries later.
Knudsen said the industry is looking at how to solve the problem with different cement additives.
"The concern with leakage ... is why we have to study and understand this," he said. "We need a comfort level that it will stay there."
Knudsen said his team also will help develop public policy on CO2 sequestration.
One issue that no one's addressed yet may become the most challenging.
The future may well mean that vast emptied subterranean oil reservoirs like at Weyburn and around the world become deep huge pockets of CO2.
In the case of Weyburn, the oil field will belong to cows and grain again and EnCana, or some other company, will be long gone.
"Who takes the long-term liability? Does it hang with the last operator, the government?" asks Knudsen. "That's an unknown part of the consideration."
(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511, or lauren@;westriv.com.)
CensusCount wrote on May 6, 2007 10:46 AM:
Comments are reviewed for taste, tone and language before posting.
Some comments may be used in the Tribune's print edition.
We value and respect your privacy, but The Bismarck Tribune might
disclose certain information to governmental entities if served with subpoena.