One of the best ways to mitigate the effects of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions is to capture and sequester those emissions in underground geological formations for permanent storage. The United States has an estimated storage capacity of 3,900 Gigatons of CO₂ within approximately 230 candidate geologic storage reservoirs, equal to 600 years of CO₂ storage at current emissions levels.

CO₂ Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) is a proven means of permanent carbon sequestration that also makes beneficial use of CO₂ to increase hydrocarbon production in aging oil and gas fields. Estimates indicate that the U.S. has the potential for 89 billion barrels of incremental oil production from EOR, because for every ton of CO₂ injected underground 1 to 2 barrels of incremental oil can be produced, depending on the geology of the oil field. Currently, there are over 100 such projects across the U.S. producing an incremental 250,000 barrels of oil per day.

In addition to its cost competitive position, GreatPoint Energy’s technology offers an attractive means to address climate change by enabling the efficient capture and sequestration of CO₂ from its hydromethanation process. Unlike conventional gasification, for which carbon capture adds significant additional cost, energy loss, and complexity, hydromethanation intrinsically captures nearly all of the CO₂ and other impurities found in coal, petroleum coke and biomass and makes it available for value-added use or long-term storage in underground geological formations.

As a result, it is both possible and desirable to locate production facilities in regions of the country where CO₂ can be sold and safely sequestered using currently available commercial EOR to boost oil and gas extraction. GreatPoint Energy sees this as one of the principal advantages of its technology.

For example, the State of Wyoming’s oil fields are, in most cases, declining in production, yet most of the oil forming the deposits in these fields remains underground. While unrecoverable by traditional production methods, significant amounts of oil in these fields can be recovered through EOR techniques that inject a CO₂ stream into an oil reserve. After the oil is displaced, the CO₂ remains sequestered safely underground.

A broad application of EOR using CO₂ produced by GreatPoint Energy would safely sequester this greenhouse gas to help prevent global warming while potentially increasing the state's ultimate oil production by anywhere from 400 million to 1.2 billion barrels.