Blog

March 4, 2024

Landmen, industry representatives who leased rights to obtain oil or gas resources from landowners “are knocking on doors again in Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio and West Virginia” reported Anya Litvak in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette on February 2, 2024.¹ But now, these dealers are not looking to take the gas out from under your soil. They want a lease to pump carbon dioxide into the ‘the pore space’ underneath your property. To sequester carbon dioxide in this manner, it has to be under high pressure and temperature. This requires a great deal of energy. Pore space² is the space between grains of sand or soil or rocks. Old mine shafts and old wells also provide pore space. To sequester carbon underground, pore space is necessary.

A lot more than pore space is necessary. Supercritical carbon dioxide is a liquid that is under high pressure and temperature.³ It always moves upward when it is injected far underground. Therefore, an impervious cap rock, identified by seismic studies, must lie over the carbon dioxide to keep it from migrating upward. Even after earthquakes occur there must be no cracks in the cap rock. If there is a crack, supercritical carbon dioxide will find it and escape to the surface.

Just as gas well pads are only part of the industrial site that produces fossil gas, carbon dioxide injection wells are only part of the industrial work that is required to sequester carbon dioxide. Pipelines, or endless roads of diesel trucks, will deliver carbon dioxide to the injection site. There will be multiple wells, because monitoring wells as well as alternative injection wells are needed. When this type of well fails it can be an immediate threat to your life, because the expanding cloud of carbon dioxide that escapes dilutes oxygen to such low levels that mammals can not survive.

The CO2 pipeline disaster at Satartia Mississippi on February 22, 2020, exemplifies the terrifying danger of these CO2 pipelines when they rupture. As reported by Julia Simon of NPR:

“In one 911 call, a mother pleaded for help because her daughter couldn’t breathe, her hacking audible in the background. Another 911 caller stranded on the highway described what was happening to her friend: “She’s laying on the ground and she’s shaking. She’s kind of drooling out of the mouth. I don’t know if she’s having a seizure or not. Can you send somebody quick!”

Humans always breathe some carbon dioxide, but too much causes a thirst for oxygen, disorientation and heart malfunction. Extreme exposures to carbon dioxide can lead to death by asphyxiation. The use of carbon dioxide to kill pigs in abattoirs is now under scrutiny over whether it complies with federal laws on humane slaughter.

Carbon dioxide in open air can disperse. But third-party air monitoring that night in Satartia showed that potent clouds of CO2 can sometimes hang in the air for hours.

It quickly became clear that the cloud of carbon dioxide was hampering the emergency response. Combustion engines need oxygen to work, and as the carbon dioxide displaced oxygen in the air, many cars stopped running.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” said the caller on the highway. “My car stopped, it won’t move, and we just got outta the car and started walking.””⁴

Tenaska, a large privately held energy company based in Omaha, Nebraska, is planning a hub of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. Carbon dioxide (CO2) captured from industrial processes will be injected under high pressures “into 20 to 30 wells across the three states.”⁵ Underground, that CO2 is expected to spread out across some 80,000 acres. This storage field is predicted to be capable of holding 5 million more tons of CO2 a year for 30 years.

Will the CO2 stay there? Carbon dioxide interacts with basalt quickly, to become solid, but in the presence of other types of rock at least hundreds of years must pass before the CO2 joins solid rock.

In June 2023, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, (IEEFA) published a report about 3 failures of CCS. The CO2 stored by Equinor⁶ did not stay where it was expected to stay. At each site Equinor had to stop injection before the planned volume had been reached. At one of the sites in Norway the CO2 spread upward to a space between layers of rock that had not been identified on seismic studies.⁷ Seismic studies are performed prior to injecting CO2 to identify the rock strata through which the injection well will be placed. To be stored underground CO2 has to be injected deep beneath a strata that can be a solid cap rock to prevent further upward expansion of the CO2. CO2 will migrate upward through cracks and laterally to preexisting wells, then upward if the well is not securely plugged. At the Equinor CCS site in Algeria, as pressure increased more than expected in the injection zone, the ground surface far above was slightly elevated.

The conclusions were that CCS should not be performed in areas below built structures, or where people have built their homes.⁸

Tenaska said it has secured about a dozen sites for injection wells across the three-state footprint and thousands of acres of pore rights so far, but declined to disclose specifics or give a capital cost for the entire project. . . . with three wells to be sited in Washington County.⁹ The laws that should be regulating this process are passing through the Pennsylvania legislature now.

The CCS work of Equinor demonstrated that even after steadfast study and monitoring using top-level technology and engineers;

• injected CO2 can move to unexpected places and behave in unexpected ways even years after what appears to have been nominal operations,

• actual behavior of what has been studied can turn out to be substantially different and replacement plans may need to be implemented with speed in order to avoid catastrophe,

• to assure long-term secure CO2 storage, ongoing monitoring and verification of storage site integrity is imperative. Backup plans must always be available in case storage formations do not behave as anticipated. The companies that invest in and operate these fields need to have the financial and technical resources at the ready to address deficiencies, deviations and unexpected performance. Above all, clear regulations and requirements are necessary across the entire CCS life cycle to maintain integrity. Pennsylvania must develop such regulations.¹⁰

As stated in the IEEFA report:

“What is unproven is whether the techniques employed in Equinox’s Norwegian CCS sites, Sleipner and Snøhvit, can safely and reliably be scaled up five times, 10 times or, in some pro posals, more than 25 times across a multitude of subsurface formations accessed by thousands of CO2 injection well sites covering tens of thousands of square kilometers. Will each and ev ery one of those wells receive the same level of seismic and gravimetric study and monitoring? Can the care and attention provided to a single well’s operation – like in the cases of Sleipner and Snøhvit be repeated within a given field containing hundreds of such wells?

What is unproven is the long-term management of storage sites after their injection wells are sealed. In the absence of permanent caretakers, those wells and formations will join the hundreds of thousands of “orphaned” wells present in the U.S., operation and responsibility abandoned.

What is unproven is the long-term management of storage sites after their injection wells are sealed. In the absence of permanent caretakers, those wells and formations will join the hun dreds of thousands of “orphaned” wells present in the U.S., operation and responsibility aban doned. How many hundreds of thousands of abandoned oil & gas wells are there in Pennsylva nia? The PA-DEP certainly does not know.

What is unproven is whether CO2 will remain sequestered with 100% reliability such that none of those sites leak what is supposed to be permanently buried CO2 back into an already strained environment.

What is unknown is the long-term viability of any subsurface storage formation. Will the gas migrate over time? Will the formations fault or deform in ways that allow the gas to escape? Are the formation’s boundaries sealed, or faulted such that the CO2 has a path to move?

The truth is that no engineer or scientist, let alone corporate executive or politician, can answer this question definitively. That is because, even using the best technology and techniques avail able today, the hard science is limited to statistically based expectations derived from costly and resource-intensive samples of subsurface data that are, by their nature, conjectures of what is going on underground. Subsurface assessment technologies are improving, but they likely will never provide a complete and foolproof picture of what nuances, exceptions, deviations, inclu sions, or limits are above and within subsurface structures.”¹¹

Last fall, Tenaska submitted a proposal to Washington County to secure an option for a few surface acres for a well and 1,377 acres under Cross Creek County Park for carbon storage. 

Cross Creek County Park is already peppered by shale gas wells drilled by Range Resources Corporation, a point noted by the staff of the planning commission, which briefly discussed the proposal at its Oct. 4 meeting. The commissioners decided to table the proposal while its staff researches potential impact to the environment and public safety, logistical issues and bonding and benefits, according to the meeting minutes.

As a physician who knows that county commissioners will be asked to approve of these CCS projects, I hope they study the detailed IEEFA report about the CCS activities of Equinor. I hope that they remember the ruptured pipeline carrying carbon dioxide from a salt cave, a sequestration site, that threatened the lives of unknowing inhabitants of Satartia, Mississippi in 2019. There had been a lot of rain. The hilly ground shifted. This stressed the pipeline and it broke.

Those suffering the most exposure to hypoxic conditions in the expanding cloud of carbon dioxide were left with permanent brain damage or lung injury. When your short-term memory is destroyed by hypoxia, you can no longer support your family or even cook for yourself.

The Geophysics: CCS May Pose Far Greater Challenges Than Oil and Gas Extraction¹²

Subsurface structures behave differently when materials are put back into them than when things are taken out. To make room for deposition, something has to be displaced or transformed, often under varying temperatures and very high pressures.

Further, CO2 storage geologic structures are targeted at significant depths in order for the compressed gas to remain in a gel-like supercritical state, which allows for better uptake in the subsurface formation. Introducing this gel to subsurface structures consistently over long periods of operations can lead to unpredictable outcomes.

As seen from Sleipner and, especially, Snøhvit’s well performance, variables can present themselves unexpectedly. Even the world’s premier subsurface geophysicists and engineers freely admit this. A 2022 paper titled, “Why CCS is not like reverse gas engineering,”¹³ jointly published by a team of Norwegian scientists, including some of Equinor’s most prominent geophysicists, provides a useful discussion of the issues. The paper clearly states many possible unknowns may be encountered and changes may occur over a field’s life – and beyond.

I found the graphs and statements in this paper to be terrifying. In my opinion, neither the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources (PA-DEP) nor the industries involved are ready to take responsible actions that acknowledge the dangers of CCS. For example, early in 2024 the PA-DEP issued a permit for a rural well that is intended to accept large volumes of radioactive toxic liquid fracking waste. PA-DEP has not yet acknowledged the more than 100 abandoned inadequately plugged wells nearby. Because Cross Creek County Park is also peppered by fracking wells, if a well for CCS were prepared in such a place, it is likely that CO2 would escape.