Moldy Peaches

A billion-dollar energy program in southern Saskatchewan has the United States government seeing green - literally. The government is gushing over a pilot project in Saskatchewan's oilpatch which is injecting carbon dioxide into the oil fields.

On Tuesday, U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said the Weyburn project has successfully sequestered five million tons of C02 into the Weyburn oilfield while doubling the field's oil recovery rate.

The Weyburn project, which is run by Calgary's Encan Corp., has "incredible implications" for reducing the U.S.'s CO2 emissions and boosting oil production, Bodman said in a news release.

"Just by applying this technique to the oil fields of Western Canada we would see billions of additional barrels of oil and a reduction in CO2 emissions equivalent to pulling more than 200 million cars off the road for a year," Bodman said.

The Petroleum Technology Research Centre (PTRC), in Regina, Saskatchewan is conducting a world leading international study that involves injecting and storing a harmful greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), underground into depleted oil and gas reservoirs in order to revive production. Field tests, combined with advanced computer simulations, have proven the CO2 will remain safely underground for thousands of years. This application of CO2 storage technology could eliminate between one-third and one-half of global emissions from the atmosphere over the next 100 years and increase oil production by billions of barrels that would otherwise be left untapped.

It's projected that enhanced oil recovery using CO2 will help the Weyburn Oilfield remain viable for another 20 years, produce an additional 130 million barrels of oil, and sequester as much as 30 million tons of CO2, the Energy Department said.

Some environmental groups have expressed concerns that storing CO2 underground might be unsafe. However, one recent scientific report on the Weyburn site suggests the technique works and the gas stays underground with minimal leakage.

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