BISMARCK — U.S. Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., on Friday, May 3, announced a $5.1 million federal grant for the University of North Dakota's Energy and Environmental Research Center to study the way carbon dioxide affects the areas where it is stored underground.
The money from the U.S. Department of Energy will be used to examine the carbon storage operations at the Great Plains Synfuels Plant owned by Dakota Gasification Co., a for-profit subsidiary of Basin Electric Power Cooperative.
The Beulah plant converts lignite coal to synthetic natural gas and other products. It is the only coal gasification plant in the country.
This is the second round of funding going to Dakota Gasification's project, which aims to store 35% of its climate-warming CO2 emissions permanently underground. It also received $1.4 million from the Energy Department for an earlier phase of the project.
The plant is one of the earliest adopters of carbon capture technology. For the last two decades, it has captured 50% of its CO2 emissions and sent them through a pipeline to southern Canada for a process called enhanced oil recovery — or EOR — which helps loosen up hard-to-recover oil in older fields.
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EERC also recently received $11.6 million from the federal Energy Department to study whether EOR would be an effective tool for both increasing oil production and storing CO2 in the aging Bakken oil fields.
EOR has been practiced for decades in older, vertically drilled conventional oil fields. It has recently been adopted in southwest North Dakota at conventional wells in Bowman County, but the horizontally drilled Bakken shale fields in northwest North Dakota have different characteristics than conventional ones, which is why the research is needed, according to the Energy Department.
Hoeven said the storage monitoring project will help prove carbon capture's effectiveness and help speed along its adoption at the state's lignite coal-fired power plants, which face new federal requirements to cut or capture 90% of their CO2 emissions by 2032 or be forced to shut down in 2039.
Though a lot of funding and research has gone into carbon capture, the practice itself is still relatively nascent and has not yet been widely adopted.
"Now when Basin says 35% is going down a hole, we can have confidence that they're meeting their goals, that they're doing what they say," Hoeven said.
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