Carbon Footprint and Principle of Additionality in CO2-EOR Projects: The Weyburn Case
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper addresses the process of using CO2 for enhanced oil recovery technique (CO2-EOR) as driver to produce more oil from depleted oil reservoirs, while leading to effective CO2 abatement. Here, a simplified summary of this complex system through a lifecycle emission analysis is presented. This analysis is based on two concepts: (i) the Carbon Footprint of CO2-EOR, and (ii) the Principle of Additionality in CO2-EOR. The data used for this analysis comes from the Weyburn project in Saskatchewan, Canada. The international community has been discussing for some time if CO2-EOR projects should be considered for carbon credits. There are still questions of "additionality" that should be addressed before the net climate impact of storing CO2 in an EOR project is verified. Since CO2-EOR has gained considerable interest within the oil and gas industry due to its potential for increased oil production, it is important to use a real case data to probe if CO2-EOR is a viable CO2 abatement technology or if on the contrary, it may result in increased emissions. This study concludes that any emissions trading benefits from CO2 storing as part of a CO2-EOR project should be discounted according to a detailed analysis of the full cycle carbon balance using the principle of additionality. A key exception to this should be when a commercially viable CO2-EOR project results in the development of pipeline infrastructure which would also enable long term geological sequestration without EOR. In this way, CO2-EOR projects could play an important catalyst role in accelerating the deployment of CCS infrastructure. Finally a sensitivity analysis has indicated that the provision of petroleum tax breaks for CO2-EOR projects on the grounds of their emissions reduction potential is not the best use of public funds. This study provides guidance to whether or not CO2-EOR projects should be eligible for carbon credits as part of deployment of CCS processes. Also this study contributes by defining an appropriate framework for developing guidelines, standards, and/or best practice manuals for the permanent geological sequestration of carbon dioxide.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".