Crews have successfully drilled more than 18,437 feet to tap Sweetwater County’s Madison Limestone formation. The engineering feat, which took months, is a major step toward establishing what developers hope will be one of the largest carbon dioxide storage projects in the U.S.
At 3.5 miles, it’s the deepest Class VI carbon dioxide injection well in the U.S., according to project officials, and it is the second well completed for the Sweetwater Carbon Storage Hub project. It is part of the public-private Wyoming CarbonSAFE program, which aims to identify geologic formations to permanently store carbon dioxide from industrial facilities in the region.
The average depth for an oil or natural gas well in Wyoming is about 8,000 feet or 1.5 miles, according to industry sources. Anything more than 12,000 feet is considered “deep,” by industry standards. The deepest petrol well in Wyoming is nearly 26,000 feet, in the Madden formation near the Lost Cabin gas plant in north-central Wyoming, according to the Petroleum Association of Wyoming.
The first well for the Sweetwater Carbon Storage Hub reached a depth of just over 16,000 feet.
“This deeper well gives us a more complete picture of the subsurface, reinforcing our commitment to building scalable, practical carbon solutions for Wyoming’s key industries,” Frontier President and Co-Chief Executive Officer Robby Rockey said in a prepared statement.
The new well, referred to as J1-15, will provide a wealth of new data to potentially confirm years of previous modeling, which has so far suggested the Madison Limestone is capable of holding large volumes of carbon dioxide. Targeting several geologic strata, the Sweetwater Carbon Storage Hub could hold more than 350 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to Frontier.
For scale, a typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Carbon dioxide capture and storage vision
The University of Wyoming’s School of Energy Resources partnered with the U.S. Department of Energy about 10 years ago on the CarbonSAFE Initiative. The vision is to advance the use of carbon capture technologies — filtering carbon dioxide from smokestacks — by providing a place to put the greenhouse gas.
It’s a major pillar of Gov. Mark Gordon’s Decarbonizing the West energy policy initiative, which he has said will help keep Wyoming’s fossil fuels in the nation’s energy mix while building a new commercial sector to reduce the nation’s industrial carbon dioxide emissions.
In addition to the Sweetwater Carbon Storage Hub project, exploration and validation efforts are underway at Echo Springs in Carbon County and at the Dry Fork Station coal-fired power plant in Campbell County. Apart from the Wyoming CarbonSAFE efforts, Tallgrass Energy is exploring a carbon sequestration project in Laramie County.
Frontier Infrastructure, a division of Dallas-based Tailwater Capital, is the primary private partner for the Sweetwater Carbon Storage Hub. The $54 million project is backed by about $43 million in federal money, according to project officials. It’s unclear, so far, exactly which companies and gas-emitting facilities might sign on to offload their carbon dioxide, but Frontier has indicated that local trona mines and soda ash processing facilities in the southwest corner of the state will serve as its “anchor” clientele.
One potential client, the Project Bison direct-air capture partnership between Carbon Capture Inc. and Frontier Carbon Solutions, is no longer active, according to those familiar with the project. Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to ease emission regulations, many still see carbon capture and carbon storage as a growing industry in the U.S. and abroad.
Frontier Infrastructure, for its part, is dedicated to “empowering industries to meet their carbon reduction goals” and helping to ensure “that the region remains competitive in an evolving global market,” according to its website.
As for the security of existing federal funding for the Sweetwater Carbon Storage Hub efforts, it is currently “obligated” through February, according to an SER official close to the project.
Why are we rushing into CO2 pipeline & storage? We know nothing about this except for accidents like (1) 1986 limnic eruption in Cameroon @ Lake Nyos, which killed 1500 humans and 3000 livestock, (2) Feb. 2020 Satartia MS accident from which some folks have not recovered, (3) April 19, 2024; Sulfur LA dodged a CO2 bullet after which authorities lied about the danger they had faced.
What we don’t know is legion. (1) if WY buries lots of CO2 3 miles underground, can we count on the heat from the center of the earth to stay down there and not expand the mine to a completely unexpected explosion and what about the people at the surface? (2) eventually that CO2 will leach its way to the surface; but we know nothing about the human-development consequences of CO2 added to the atmosphere, not even for mice, let alone humans. It could degrade the lives of our progeny and they’d never track it, or know what is happening to them because WE DON’T STUDY WHAT HAPPENS TO MAMMALS IN INCREASED CO2!
Wyoming! Think of the future. Your monetary gains will be paid for by future generations
What would happen to the 350 million metric tonnes of fluids extracted during the CO2 injection?
That’s a good question, is it stored somewhere or evapped in a pond.
All of this effort despite the fact that CO2 is not the “problem” it’s made out to be. Capturing CO2 at the levels proposed will have only a minimal effect on global emissions, and in addition CO2 is not a “pollutant”, and not a major cause of “climate change.” In fact it is one other planet’s major drivers of life and climate stability. This is a tax money solution looking for a problem and enriching others along the way.
Too much of anything is a bad thing. The difference between a medicine and a poison is the dose. Too much CO2 is bad. Too much CO2 in a room can kill you. Too much CO2 in the atmosphere can kill all of us. It was the same story with acid rain and too much Sulfur Dioxide and Nitrogen Oxides in the atmosphere. We made changes to how much of those gases can be released and vastly reduced instances of acid rain. CO2 may not have as visible affect that can be tracked and seen like acid rain but that doesn’t mean it’s not causing harm.
Again too much of anything is never a good thing.
Remember that guy who lived on Mt St Helens. He was told it was going to erupt, but he just kept saying he wasn’t going leave?
It’s like 95 percent of relevant scientists are telling us human activity is causing climate change, but it’s just easier to not listen, ignore them or even worse come up with stuff like this “CO2 is not a major cause of ‘climate change’.”
The facts are out there, but there’s a ton of vested interests trying to keep us from seeing them.