Oil and gas firms pitch pipelines for CO₂ capture

Some oil and gas firms are leveraging their expertise in handling CO₂ to create a new crop of customers based on carbon capture equipment and services.

The pipeline company Kinder Morgan formed a New Energy Transition Ventures division in mid-March that will invest in carbon capture and sequestration as well as in hydrogen production and renewable energy.

Kinder Morgan sells CO₂ on a billion-dollar scale annually, with almost all of it coming from underground deposits and being used for enhanced oil recovery. “Now we’re looking to invest upstream in the form of carbon capture,” group president Jesse Arenivas told Bloomberg.

Separately, the fuel and petrochemical maker Valero is planning a 2,000 km network of liquid CO₂ pipelines in Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Illinois. The pipelines are intended to bring CO₂ from ethanol makers and other industrial sources in the Midwest to sequestration sites in southern Illinois.

Federal, state, academic, and corporate researchers have been studying the region’s carbon storage capacity for several years. Large, deep saline reservoirs and sandstone formations that could hold billions of tons of CO₂ abound in the area, according to a 2019 study sponsored by the US Department of Energy.

Southern Illinois also contains exhausted oil wells that could be revived using enhanced oil recovery based on CO₂ injection, the report notes.

Valero expects its project to transport 5 million–8 million metric tons of CO₂ per year. The firm is soliciting customers that might want to send their CO₂ down the pipelines.