New climate deal spurs hopes of more carbon storage projects
GILLETTE, Wyo. — The rolling prairie lands of northeastern Wyoming have been a paradise of lush, knee-deep grass for sheep, cattle and pronghorn antelope this summer.
But it’s a different green — greener energy — that geologist Fred McLaughlin seeks as he drills nearly two miles into the ground, far deeper than the thick coal seams that make this the top coal-mining region in the United States.
McLaughlin and his University of Wyoming colleagues are studying whether tiny spaces in rock deep underground can permanently store vast volumes of greenhouse gas emitted by a coal-fired power plant.
This is the concept known as carbon storage, long touted as an answer to global warming that preserves the energy industry’s burning of fossil fuels to generate electricity.
So far, removing carbon dioxide from power plant smokestacks and pumping it underground hasn’t been feasible without higher electricity bills to cover the technique’s huge costs.
But with a $2.5 billion infusion from Congress last year and now bigger tax incentives through the Inflation Reduction Act recently passed by Congress, researchers and industry continue to try.
One goal of McLaughlin’s project is to preserve the lifespan of a relatively new coal-fired power plant, Dry Fork Station, run by Basin Electric Power Cooperative. State officials hope it will do the same for the whole beleaguered coal industry that still underpins Wyoming’s economy. The state produces about 40 percent of the nation’s coal but declining production and a series of layoffs and bankruptcies have beset the Gillette area’s vast, open-pit coal mines over the past decade.
While the economics of carbon storage remain uncertain at best, McLaughlin and others are confident in the technology.
“The geology exists,” McLaughlin said. “It is a resource we’re looking for — and the resource is pore space.”
How it works
By pore space, McLaughlin doesn’t mean skin care but microscopic spaces between grains of sandstone deep underground. Countless such spaces add up: Enough, he hopes, to hold 55 million tons of carbon dioxide over 30 years.
McLaughlin and his team used the same drill rigs as the oil industry to bore their two wells almost 10,000 feet, taking core samples from nine geological formations in the process. The researchers will study how injection at one well, using saltwater as a stand-in for liquid carbon dioxide, could affect fluid behavior at the other.
“It’s basically like a call and response, if you want to think of it that way,“McLaughlin said.
McLaughlin’s team also does a lot of lab work on carbon sequestration back at the University of Wyoming School of Energy Resources in Laramie, studying on a microscopic scale how much carbon dioxide different sandstone layers can hold. They model on computers how much carbon dioxide, well by well, could be pumped underground north of Gillette.
Eventually they want to advance to carbon dioxide captured from the smoke plume at nearby Dry Fork Station, using a technique developed by California-based Membrane Technology and Research, Inc.
Wyoming’s dreams
With an eye toward carbon storage, Wyoming in 2020 became one of just two states, along with North Dakota, to take over from the Environmental Protection Agency primary authority to issue the kind of permit McLaughlin and his team will need to pump large volumes of carbon dioxide, pressurized into a high density “supercritical” state, underground.
Besides the permit, the geologists will also need more funding. The U.S. Department of Energy Carbon Storage Assurance Facility Enterprise (CarbonSAFE) program is funding 24 carbon capture and storage projects nationwide, and this is one of the furthest along.