ENERGY INDEPENDENCE ON THE HORIZON - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 60

simple choice. If regulators allow drilling, production could surge, with
each prospect adding well over a million barrels a day to total U.S. oil
output (and potentially much more). If big parts of these oil-rich pros-
pects are kept or placed of -limits instead, no oil will be produced.
h ere is, however, another wild card that some argue could boost
U.S. oil production by as much as two million barrels a day over the
next two decades without needing to open new lands for oil produc-
tion: using carbon dioxide to get more oil out of old i elds. For decades,
U.S. producers have injected carbon dioxide into depleted oil wells in
order to boost their pressure and spur continued production; today,
roughly a quarter million barrels a day of U.S. oil production comes
from this so-called CO 2 -EOR, short for carbon dioxide enhanced oil
recovery. 26 Advanced Resources International, a consultancy, has esti-
mated that sixty-seven billion barrels of oil (equal to roughly ten years
of U.S. demand) could proi tably be extracted this way at an oil price
of eighty-i ve dollars per barrel. 27 h e Department of Energy has looked
at how quickly this oil could be produced, concluding that U.S. produc-
tion could rise to nearly a million barrels a day by 2035. 28 h e Natural
Resources Defense Council (NRDC)—hardly a hotbed of oil boost-
ers—has pegged the potential, circa 2030, at closer to two million bar-
rels a day. 29 h e 2011 analysis from Advanced Resources International,
prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy, tops all of these, pointing
to as much as four million barrels a day of potential output. 30
h e catch is that there's no ready source of carbon dioxide to match
the scale of the opportunity. h e CO 2 -EOR projects currently exist-
ing in the United States rely largely on natural formations that contain
carbon dioxide, like the Bravo Dome in eastern New Mexico, which
supplies i elds in west Texas, and Mississippi's Jackson Dome, whose
CO 2 is used in state and in neighboring Louisiana. A few use artii cial
sources: the largest group, in Wyoming and Colorado, harnesses CO 2
produced at the LaBarge gas plant in western Wyoming.
h e biggest concentrated source of carbon dioxide, though, is in
smokestack emissions from power plants. Alas, it's expensive to scour
those emissions, condense them, and send them down pipelines to
oil-producing sites. h e reason the NRDC has talked up enhanced
oil recovery (EOR) is that if policymakers want to turbocharge the