Plain Talk: North Dakota needs ‘hundreds of billions of tons’ of carbon

MINOT — “It’s hard to do enhanced oil recovery,” Charles Gorecki said during a Plain Talk podcast interview from the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference.

Gorecki is the head of the Energy and Environmental Research Center at the University of North Dakota. That organization conducts exploratory research explicitly driven by North Dakota’s industrial and environmental needs. Stuff like how to reduce flaring, how to build safer pipelines and how to enhance oil recovery.

The theme of the conference, which

brings together all the major players in North Dakota’s oil and gas industry,

was “cracking the code,” which is a reference to ongoing efforts for enhanced oil recovery. Something that could perhaps set off a second oil boom, and prolong the oil and gas industry’s prodigious contributions to North Dakota’s economic prosperity and tax revenues.

Gorecki said there are many promising paths to enhanced oil recovery, but using captured carbon emissions to unlock more oil from wells is one of the most promising. The problem? We don’t have enough of it.

“I’ve talked about CO2 being the thing that we need in massive quantities, hundreds of billions of tons to really unlock the Bakken,” he told us.

“For context, our coal fire power plants in the state of North Dakota produce annually about 30 million tons of CO2,” he continued. “So it would take all the coal fire power plant CO2 emissions captured times three or more to really enhance that recovery to have what we would consider basically, volumetrically, a second boom in the Bakken.”

But getting that carbon to North Dakota has proven politically fraught. Opposition to a carbon pipeline proposed by Summit Carbon Solutions has

caused that project to be rerouted to Wyoming,

and while some of that outcome had to do with Summit’s

aggressive and ham-handed

approach to landowners, there’s no question there’s a noisy and organized movement against carbon pipelines in general.

Gorecki told us “there’s a lot of misinformation” about the issue. “We transport things in a number of different ways in this country. We transport them by truck, by train, by pipeline,” he said. “And by far the safest way to transport large amounts of liquids and gases is in pipelines.”

Also on this episode, guest co-host Alison Ritter and I talked about the controversies around data centers, and carbon pipelines, and whether too many in the public are taking North Dakota’s economic prosperity for granted.

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