"Carbon Capture" Plans In LA Call For Using Areas Home To 120,000 Abandoned Wells For CO2 Injection

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After more than a century of pulling carbon from underground, a rush is underway to pump it back down. Companies have applied for scores of permits across the country to inject carbon dioxide deep into the earth. Several projects have already been approved. With industry planning to inject tens of millions of tons annually, a looming question is whether the climate-warming gas will stay underground.

The most likely points of failure, experts say, could be some of the millions of abandoned oil and gas wells that perforate the nation, often in the same areas targeted for storing carbon dioxide underground. A new report underscores the risk those wells pose in Louisiana, home to more proposed carbon storage projects than any other state.

There are about 120,000 abandoned wells in Louisiana overlying geological zones that could store carbon dioxide, more than 13,000 of which were plugged before modern standards were adopted in 1953, according to a report published by the Center for Applied Environmental Science at the Environmental Integrity Project, a watchdog group. A separate count, by the Louisiana-based advocacy group Healthy Gulf, looked within a 5-mile radius of the proposed projects and found about 7,000 oil and gas wells.

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“Alertness is reasonable, but great fear is not,” said Susan Hovorka, a senior research scientist at the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas, which is funded by government and energy companies involved in carbon storage. Many environmental advocates remain skeptical, however, and they point to problems caused by the injection of oilfield wastewater under high pressure in West Texas and other regions, the best existing analogue for the planned industrial-scale storage of CO2. In recent years, toxic brine has seeped and spewed out of old oil and gas wells across West Texas near wastewater injection wells, spouting more than 100 feet in the air and creating an artificial saline lake. The wastewater injections have also caused earthquakes, as the pressurized fluid interacts with faults. Carbon dioxide would be injected as a “supercritical” fluid that has properties of both a gas and liquid.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20032024/louisiana-abandoned-oil-gas-wells-carbon-dioxide-storage/