A little bit of good news (CO2 injections into previously depleted reservoirs?)

This is an area that is not often talked about, but in many of the plots of peak oil, there is the curve that goes up and then switchbacks down which is main crude oil production. Sitting like a rather large boil on the shoulder of the downside of that fold is an uptick that is called enhanced oil recovery (EOR) or tertiary recovery.

One of the more promising techniques for EOR is injecting carbon dioxide into a layer of rock that still has oil, but where it cannot easily be obtained normally. There are two benefits to using CO2. One of these is to strip some of the gas out of the atmosphere. The University of Texas recently showed that they could inject liquid CO2 into a depleted oil reservoir, and because the reservoir was a fluid trap, it would hold the gas and keep it from getting back into the atmosphere.

More after the jump at The Oil Drum