More than $40 million in federal dollars coming to New Mexico for carbon sequestration

The Petroleum Recovery Research Center at New Mexico Tech has been putting carbon into the ground for 20 years and researching carbon capture for decades. This year the center was awarded $41.1 million in federal funding for a Four Corners carbon storage project.

Interest in carbon capture has grown as more companies feel pressured from investors to be sustainable, said Robert Balch, director of the Petroleum Recovery Research Center. The federal government also has created new carbon-storage tax incentives to help compensate companies for the cost of putting carbon in the ground. The Inflation Reduction Act and Build Back Better Bill made it more commercially viable to store CO² with changes to the tax incentives, Balch said.

Building a bridge

Carbon capture is a bridge technology, meant to buy time to build out more noncarbon-based energy infrastructure like solar and wind farms while still reducing carbon emissions, Balch said.

“We have 27 years left to manage a significant amount of our carbon emissions,” Balch said, citing the Paris Agreement plan for worldwide reduction in carbon emissions to keep global temperature change at only 1.5 degrees above pre-Industrial Revolution levels.

“You can’t wait until 2045 and do it all at once,” Balch said.

According to Balch, a big problem that needs to be solved with renewable energy sources is better ways to store power, while another problem is finding more of the materials that are used for renewable energy production and storage.

“So, we need to increase mining of some of these rare earths and lithium and things like that, cobalt, by an order of magnitude, by a factor of 10 times, to be able to use those the way people think that we can use them already. … It takes 10 years to put a new lithium mine online. So what do you do for 10 years? I think you don’t wait. You do what you can do now, and the thing that we can do now is we can decarbonize kind of traditional stuff.”

Robert Cordingley, president of 350 Santa Fe, a chapter of the 350 organization that is focused on environmental justice, is not against researching carbon capture and sequestration technology, but he is opposed to putting resources into technology that tries to keep coal-fired plants open longer.

“It’s a terrible way to manage carbon emissions,” Cordingley said. He thinks money should be put toward speeding up the development of renewable energy, such as wind and solar instead.

“Carbon capture can be used for enhanced oil recovery, which I think is a terrible idea just because it’s adding to the problem. It’s improving the productivity of existing oil wells and natural gas wells, so that’s obviously the wrong direction to be going in if you’re trying to stop burning fossil fuels, which I think we should be trying to do,” Cordingley said.

Land of carbon

New Mexico is a good place to study carbon capture and sequestration in part because of the geology. Carbon sequestration has to be done deep in the ground, away from groundwater or planned mining projects.

“You’re looking for places where you have some rock layers that are very impermeable to CO² above other rock layers where you have the potential to store the CO²,” Balch said.

There’s also expertise in the state because of the large oil and gas industry, which regularly drills wells and builds pipelines, and the long-term study New Mexico Tech has done on carbon capture and sequestration.

“There are many wells in New Mexico right now that are already storing CO² — thousands of wells for enhanced oil recovery projects, like back from the 1970s, but also CO² storage from natural gas processors. There’s around 20 wells that are pure storage in the southeast part of the state already,” Balch said.

The research center was created in 1977 “because New Mexico had hit a peak in oil production, and the economy then, even still today, is highly dependent upon revenue from oil and gas,” Balch said.

One way to rejuvenate oil reservoirs is by putting CO² in them.

“What you discover when you put CO² into a depleted oil reservoir is that it doesn’t come back out, or some part of it gets stuck every time you circulate the CO² into the system.”

In the early 2000s, the U.S. Department of Energy started funding work for research into intentionally capturing carbon . The New Mexico Tech secured $100 million in funding in 2002 for an ongoing carbon storage project called the Southwest Regional Partnership on carbon sequestration. After 21 years, the project will wrap up next year. The PRRC did more than a dozen pilot projects.

“We tried putting CO² into coal seams, into gas reservoirs, into oil and gas reservoirs, into saline aquifers at very deep depths,” Balch said.

Along with other regional carbon sequestration projects, the PRRC helped write guiding documents that the EPA uses for permitting carbon storage wells.

Four Corners project

The research center is involved in 60 carbon capture projects across the West and Southwest, but one of the more recently funded is a Four Corners Carbon Capture project, which is getting $41.1 million from the U.S. Department of Energy and $10 million from other funding sources.

The project is significant in Balch’s eyes because a lot of groups are interested in using the carbon storage that is being developed.

“They’re the Navajo Nation, they’re the Southern Utes, Jicarilla Apache and other entities up in the Four Corners, especially places that have been really heavily impacted by energy policy,” Balch said.

New Mexico Tech will study three potential carbon sequestration sites in the San Juan Basin to find one that can hold 50 million metric tons of CO² for 30 years.

“I suspect in 30 years that this is going to be not a big business, but in the meantime, you really need it, if you want to decarbonize now. And that’s because it’s something we can do right now with current technology,” Balch said.