Needed: a national enhanced oil recovery initiative

Samuel Thernstrom writes about the astonishing promise of enhanced oil recovery:

Expanding EOR markets could arguably do more to improve American energy security​—​in both transportation and electricity-generation fuels​—​while simultaneously moving us closer to a zero-emissions energy system than any other single policy we could pursue. Even small-government conservatives should be willing to consider policies that leverage such significant outcomes out of limited federal interventions, particularly when the alternative is an expensive and ineffective regulatory approach to these issues.

This last point bears emphasizing: Industrial sources of carbon dioxide such as power plants would no longer be just electric generators in this context; they would become an integral part of the oil production process. There are places in America where there’s a lot of oil to be had​—​if we had carbon dioxide to extract it. An EOR initiative would mean that the impetus to install carbon capture on power plants would no longer be a politically contentious pollution control measure imposed by Washington; instead, it would be a profitable way to harness an essential chemical for oil production.

Given that America’s oil consumption is just under 7 billion barrels a year and domestic production is projected to top 3.1 billion barrels in 2014, the opportunity for federal policy to unlock access to 85 billion barrels of economical oil​—​potentially producing as much as an additional 2 to 3 million barrels of oil per day for the next 50 years​—​seems worthy of serious consideration to say the least.

The EOR opportunity is much bigger than Keystone XL​—​and it’s American oil, not Canadian tar sands. It’s bigger than the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge​—​and it involves extracting additional oil from existing fields; even the Natural Resources Defense Council approves of enhanced oil recovery as a pragmatic alternative to drilling new fields. And it could arguably do more for decarbonization than EPA regulations, yet it remains at the margins of the national conversation about energy and climate.

The metric of success for a climate policy should not be just the tonnage of avoided annual emissions; the more important question is whether we are making decarbonization possible and practical on a global scale.

A national enhanced oil recovery initiative wouldn’t entirely protect America from the vagaries of global oil markets or fully eliminate carbon dioxide emissions from our electric power plants​—​but it would make genuine, important progress on both fronts, and that would be no small feat.

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