DOE awards money for Central Valley CO2 storage

SACRAMENTO
May 6, 2008 2:53pm

The West Coast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (WESTCARB) has been given a $65.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to move ahead with plans to pump billions of cubic feet of carbon dioxide into the ground near Bakersfield.

It is one of six large-scale “carbon sequestration” projects in the country getting funding.

The DOE says scientists hope to demonstrate the ability of a geologic formation to safely, permanently, and economically store more than one million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) gas.

“The formations to be tested during the third phase of the partnerships program are the most promising of the major geologic basins in the United States. Collectively, these formations have the potential to store more than 100 hundred years of CO2 emissions from all major point sources in North America,” says Acting Deputy Secretary of Energy Jeffrey Kupfer.

“Tests like these will help provide the confidence and build the infrastructure necessary to commercialize these technologies, and will enable the U.S. to continue using its vast resources of coal while protecting the earth for future generations,” he says.

The new projects will demonstrate the entire CO2 injection process — pre-injection characterization, injection process monitoring, and post-injection monitoring — for large-scale injections of one million tons or more to test the ability of different geologic settings to permanently store CO2.

In the first stages of the projects, researchers will characterize the selected sites. Over the first 24 months, researchers and industry partners will complete the modeling, monitoring, and infrastructure improvements needed before CO2 can be injected. These efforts will establish a baseline for future monitoring after CO2 injection begins. Each project will then inject one million tons or more of CO2 into a regionally significant storage formation. After injection, investigators will monitor and model the fate of the CO2 to determine the effectiveness of the storage reservoir.

The WESTCARB Partnership, led by the California Energy Commission, will conduct a geologic CO2 storage project in the San Joaquin Basin in the Central Valley. The project will inject 1 million tons of CO2 over 4 years into deep (7,000+ feet) geologic formations below a 50-megawatt, zero-emission power plant in Kimberlina. The Clean Energy Systems plant uses natural or synthesis gas in an oxyfuel system and produces a relatively pure stream of CO2, the DOE says. This CO2 will be compressed and injected into one of a number of potential storage formations below the surface of the plant.

The WESTCARB Partnership includes California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Hawaii, and British Columbia.

The total project cost is over $90 million, with federal tax money paying $65.6 million of that and the states and province the remainder.