Carbon captured from power plants potential key to future oil production
WASHINGTON • A new $1 billion Texas project to capture carbon dioxide from a coal-burning power plant and use it to extract hard-to-get oil out of existing wells may be a breakthrough that a coalition of energy, technological and environmental interests has been looking for.
If successful, the project could have a long-term effect on Missouri and Illinois, among the most coal-dependent states for electrical power generation.
The project’s announcement came just weeks after President Barack Obama proposed reduction of carbon emissions from power plants by 30 percent by 2030. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated that 82 percent of human-caused greenhouse gases in the U.S. in 2012 came from carbon dioxide.
The new Texas facility, a joint venture of the U.S. energy giant NRG and the Japanese oil and gas exploration company JX Nippon, will capture emissions from a coal-burning power plant and pipe the carbon dioxide 82 miles to current oil fields for a process called Enhanced Oil Recovery.
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