MP: This is in response to your question on CO2 injection. As I understand it (I am not an expert in this area), each oil field has its inherent pressure which makes the oil come out of the ground when companies drill a hole. This pressure declines over time, thus the rate of production declines too because the motive force decreases. Injecting CO2 has been used many times to boost pressure, and it can work on most reservoirs that have not been subjected to such "secondary" extraction techniques before. However, one disadvantage is if there is any gas (natural gas for burning) in that oil reservoir, it will get diluted with the injected CO2, making it unsaleable as natural gas.

I would hazard to guess that maybe 25-50% of the total oil production could benefit from CO2 injection. The problem comes from not having a source of compressed gas near the fields. There are a few pipelines in the US today that use the same idea - take CO2 from a natural gas/CO2 mixed reservoir and pipe it to another place where CO2 is needed. I just do not know enough about the geographical spread of these pipelines to get any handle on what impact it could have on enhanced oil recovery via CO2 injection. Extracting CO2 from power plant exahust, while novel, is very capital intensive and unlikely to compete against the naturally gathered CO2 (many gas fields can have as high as 25% CO2 in the natural gas). The naturally gathered CO2 is more easily extractable (higher concentrations) and thus pipeable. Just some thoughts ... Anil