706: North Dakota needs 'hundreds of billions of tons' of carbon

"It's hard to do enhanced oil recovery," Charles Gorecki said during a Plain Talk podcast interview from the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference. Gorecki is the head of the Energy & Environmental Research Center at the Univeresity of North Dakota. That organization conducts exploratory research explicitly driven by North Dakota's industrial and environmental needs. Stuff like how to reduce flaring, how to build safer pipelines and how to enhance oil recovery. The theme of the conference, which brings together all the major players in North Dakota's oil and gas industry, was "cracking the code," which is a reference to on-going efforts for enhanced oil recovery. Something that could perhaps set off a second oil boom, and prolong the oil and gas industry's prodigious contributions to North Dakota's economic prosperity and tax revenues. Gorecki said there are many promising paths to enhanced oil recovery, but using captured carbon emissions to unlock more oil from wells is one of the most promising. The problem? We don't have enough of it. "I've talked about CO2 being the thing that we need in massive quantities, hundreds of billions of tons to really unlock the Bakken," he told us. "For context, our coal fire power plants in the state of North Dakota produce annually about 30 million tons of CO2," he continued. "So it would take all the coal fire power plant CO2 emissions captured times three or more to really enhance that recovery to have what we would consider basically volumetrically a second boom in the Bakken." But getting that carbon to North Dakota has proven politically fraught. Opposition to a carbon pipeline proposed by Summit Carbon Solutions has caused that project to be rerouted to Wyoming, and while some of that outcome had to do with Summit's aggressive and ham-handed approach to landowners, there's no question that there's a noisy and organized movement against carbon pipelines in general. Gorecki told us "there's a lot of misinformation" about the issue. "We transport things in a number of different ways in this country. We transport them by truck, by train, by pipeline," he said. "And by far the safest way to transport large amounts of of liquids and gases is in pipelines." Also on this episode, me and guest co-host Alison Ritter talked about the controversies around data centers, and carbon pipelines, and whether too many in the public are taking North Dakota's economic prosperity for granted. If you want to participate in Plain Talk, just give us a call or text at 701-587-3141. It's super easy — leave your message, tell us your name and where you're from, and we might feature it on an upcoming episode. To subscribe to Plain Talk, search for the show wherever you get your podcasts or use one of the links below. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket Casts | Episode Archive