CO2 leaks worry Sask. farmers

[CHIMO]

A Saskatchewan farm couple says greenhouse gases that were supposed to be stored permanently underground are leaking out, killing animals and sending groundwater foaming to the surface like shaken-up soda pop.

Cameron and Jane Kerr, who own land above the Weyburn oilfield in eastern Saskatchewan, have released a consultant's report that claims to link high concentrations of carbon dioxide in their soil to gas injected underground every day.

"We've lost a home, we've got a back yard full of sand and gravel that we don't think we can sell," Cameron Kerr told CBC News Tuesday.

Energy giant Cenovus injects 8,000 tonnes of the gas every day in an attempt to enhance oil recovery and fight climate change.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/saskatchewan/story/2011/01/11/sk-carbon-complaint-1101.html
Tuesday, January 11, 2011 | 7:49 PM CST

[WhiteTara]

1. that last part makes no sense

"Energy giant Cenovus injects 8,000 tonnes of the gas every day in an attempt to enhance oil recovery and fight climate change."

How can you fight climate change when you are releasing CO2?

[CHIMO]

2. Carbon sequestration

Carbon sequestration is 'The process of removing carbon from the atmosphere and depositing it in a reservoir.'<1>

It is a geoengineering technique for long-term storage of carbon dioxide or other forms of carbon to either mitigate or defer global warming. It has been proposed as a way to slow the atmospheric and marine accumulation of greenhouse gases, which are released by burning fossil fuels.<2>

Carbon dioxide is naturally captured from the atmosphere through biological, chemical or physical processes. Some anthropogenic sequestration techniques exploit these natural processes.<3>

CO2 may be captured as a pure by-product in processes related to petroleum refining or from flue gases from power generation.<4> CO2 sequestration includes the storage part of carbon capture and storage, which refers to large-scale, permanent artificial capture and sequestration of industrially produced CO2 using subsurface saline aquifers, reservoirs, ocean water, aging oil fields, or other carbon sinks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/prairies/carbon-capture-project-leaking-into-their-land-couple-says/article1866299/

[TheMadMonk]

3. Shallow well suquestration is almost certain to fail.

Overlying strata get stresses as oil is extracted, faults open as the isostatic pressures in the oil bearing strata drop and remove support for the ground above. Nothing spectacular, but enough to make sure that that ground is no longer gas tight.

Even deep well sequestration is likely to fail over geological time, but I also believe it is a viable candidate for getting us over the hump of the next century or so. Maybe not the best candidate, but still viable.

I suspect what we have here is an oil extraction company "greenwashing" its image by conflating their extraction method with sequestration.

[Nihil]

5. ... is a lie as practiced today.

Carbon sequestration is a theoretical geoengineering technique for long-term storage
of carbon dioxide or other forms of carbon to either mitigate or defer global warming.

As practiced today, it is a seriously deadly case of greenwash to allow fossil-fuel
extraction companies to keep their profits up doing Business As Usual.

Still, nobody really gives a flying f*ck about the situation so those people will
just have to suck it up and die quietly.

[eppur_se_muova]

4. This is EXACTLY what I thought would happen.

There are naturally formed gas vents in several places around the world that continuously emit CO2 -- killing all animal life in the vicinity, particularly where CO2 pools in depressions. Remember reading about a rancher in NE losing cattle to CO2 poisoning -- *before* 'sequestration' was even invented.

CO2 dissolves in water under pressure. All it takes is moisture in the rock and CO2 will find its way out.

[formercia]

6. CO2 dissolved in Water makes Carbonic Acid

It may be dissolving the rock and opening fissures.