Capturing CO2 and injecting it into a well to squeeze more oil out of the ground is not real carbon sequestration. Why? When the recovered oil is burned, it releases at least as much CO2 as was stored (and possibly much more). Therefore, CO2 used for such enhanced oil recovery (EOR) does not reduce net carbon emissions and should not be sold to the public as a carbon offset.

Yet a company, Blue Source, LLC, proposes to do just that, to capture the CO2 from a fertilizer plant, pipe it to an oil field, and inject it into wells for EOR :

The company hopes to profit from the project by earning credits for the carbon reductions in voluntary carbon markets and by selling carbon dioxide to energy companies.

The deal will cut CO2 from the plant by about 650,000 tonnes per year by permanently storing the emissions in the oil fields, he said. The U.S. Department of Energy says that capturing CO2 from power plants for enhanced oil recovery could greatly boost U.S. oil reserves while permanently keeping CO2 from reaching the atmosphere.

Uhh, no. To repeat, if the captured CO2 is used to extract oil that releases CO2 when it is burned, then how is that offsetting anything?

The key ratio is CO2 injected vs. CO2 released from recovered oil. Fortunately, BP and UCLA did that life-cycle analysis (subs. req’d) in 2001 and concluded, “the EOR activity is almost carbon-neutral when comparing net storage potential and gasoline emissions from the additional oil extracted.” And that may be optimistic. The study notes:

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Climate Progress is happy to introduce Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) as the latest guest blogger. Jay has long been a leader on energy and climate issues (his full bio is here). In March, he was appointed to the 15-member Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. He has a forthcoming book on climate solutions with Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Bracken Hendricks — Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy. I’ve known Jay since we appeared on a panel together in January 2007. He is uniquely qualified to provide an insider’s view on climate issues. Welcome, Jay!

We lost a battle but won a war against the Bush Administration’s refusal to address global warming on Tuesday. The battle means little. The war could mean a lot.

As a congressman from Seattle, I joined Senator John Kerry (D-MA) and other plaintiffs in supporting a lawsuit to force the Administration to issue the statutorily required national scientific assessment of global warming. Tuesday, Federal District court Judge Sandra Brown Armstrong ordered the Administration to comply with its legal duty to provide the American people a full and fair assessment of the science underpinning this national threat, as the law requires.

For an administration bound and determined to ignore the clear science of global warming, this is a traumatic event. For America, it is a long overdue win for the environment — and our grandchildren. In its ruling, the court held that Senator Kerry and I would not become parties to the case because we have access to a congressional remedy unlike the other plaintiffs. Since we obtained the result we desired, we can consider it a total victory nonetheless.

This does not mean that we are out of the woods yet, of course. The President’s outright refusal to accept a cap and trade system for carbon dioxide is a major hurdle to an effective global warming strategy. But this ruling means President Bush will not be able to argue that there are no costs to America for his policy of rank indifference to this major threat. In short, he may still be able to run, but he cannot hide.

It is about time the Administration is required to follow science rather than their political allies. This legal ruling means that we are one step forward in being able to require them to do just that.

I’ve argued that scientists are not overestimating climate change and in fact are underestimating it because they are omitting crucial amplifying feedbacks from their models. In this post, I’ll show how these omissions suggest the climate has a “point of no return” that severely constrains the safe level of human-generated emissions.

A major 2005 study (subs. req’d) led by NCAR climate researcher David Lawrence, found that virtually the entire top 11 feet of permafrost around the globe could disappear by the end of this century. Using the first “fully interactive climate system model” applied to study permafrost, the researchers found that if we somehow stabilize CO2 concentrations in the air at 550 ppm, permafrost would plummet from over 4 million square miles today to 1.5 million. If concentrations hit 690 ppm, permafrost would shrink to just 800,000 square miles.

While these projections were done with one of the world’s most sophisticated climate system models, the calculations do not include the feedback effect of the released carbon from the permafrost, which has locked in it more carbon than the atmosphere (and much of that is in the form of methane, a potent greenhouse gas).

That is to say, the CO2 concentrations in the model rise only as a result of direct emissions from humans, with no extra emissions counted from soils or tundra. Thus they are conservative numbers–or overestimates–of how much CO2 concentrations have to rise to trigger irreversible melting.

How do carbon cycle feedbacks constrain future safe levels of CO2 emissions? There’s really only one major climate model that can answer that crucial question. Read more